Geno Mario and Luigi Bowser's Inside Story (Battle)

[Ridge Troopa]

I should be like..an M&L Mod for these sort of things lol

hello

MegaMario, Before you try to change anything else on this battle pose, I would suggest making other views first, namely a front and side (profile) standing/direction sprites. It will help you tweak not only size issues but also proportioning him correctly. (The diagonal pose should be your in-battle base; characters around Geno's size use the same parts for overworld and battle.)

Getting more specific:
Palette - Your palette is crying for help. First off, try to make colors more saturated and shades more contrasting. Right now, this almost looks like PiT style (that's a bad thing).
Steal Mario's blue and try to make a pallet of 5-6 colors for his body/wood (use the darkest for his shoes and shade them with black). You shouldn't need more than one yellow; you can use his wood shades to shade the yellow on his cape and hat. For the reds/hair, you only really need 2-3 colors, the darkest of which you can use on the eyes...
Size - Please get rid of Luigi, he's completely useless to you here. Get a real size comparison with Mario/Geno from both SMRPG and BIS in a standing pose.
Details and Shading - Once you refine your palette, you need to work on shading and detailing Geno correctly. Instead of using only dark outlines everywhere (ex. his face, chest, and knees) you need to smooth things out with blending/shading/AA.
Animation - This is the last thing you should worry about. You need to get a static standing pose completed and ready to go before you even try to revamp the idle.
Anyway, As others have pointed out, the idle animation isn't that bad, but it doesn't fit with Geno. Geno is more stoic and doesn't move very much; he's a wooden doll, almost like a robot. Also, you need to add more frames so the animation is smoother overall. BIS isn't Superstar Saga, you can't just bounce between five frames.

I don't like how the yellow symbol on his hat is stationary, yet the back of it moves.

Don't shoot me for this, but after seeing enough of Geno, the yellow symbol on his hat (to me) really is a symbol, not an actual bow or something. So I don't see why it should move.
The hair, however, does need to move a little.

Hopefully the amount of text in this post isn't off-putting to the point of skimming, but trust me, I'm not just throwing out random criticisms. You need all of them.