The latter. You can't rotate sprites without stuff like mode 7 on the SNES, and that would affect everything else in the level. So dynamic sprites often just had a ton of frames.
Part of the "thought they were bats" train... after all, birds usually have beaks and not fangs. Though I also though the green part of their face was a pig-like nose, and the two little dots its nostrils. But when you defeat one, they're...
Ooh, I'm curious how those fire boulders are animated. Does the sprite rotate along the ground like in Wario Land 4, or did you have to manually make a spritesheet with each frame rotating?
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mostly ai generated and/or fetish content, followed up by a lot young children making dumb fill in memes about their favorite kids shows, followed very distantly by what the original purpose was, ACTUAL (nonfetish, bc fetish...
I thought they were bats too..
I looked up "Arab Bat" (since they mainly appear in Arabian Nights) and found this which I guess looks somewhat similar with its big nose.