Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze

[Gors]

I do stand on the "rare does dumb characters quite often" side though

They do their job of posing a threat/helping you activate an event but literally no characters in, say, banjo & kazooie, save the main/secondaty cast, are examples of good design

Lets face it, they used the googly eyes on many things and called it a day. Googly eyes on rocks, on ice cubes, on cauliflowers, on bee hives, on boxes. Then we get googly eyed termites, googly eyed animals and washing machines. They do work for what theyre intended, but ehhhh. Not really captivating. If anyone says thats not boring character design i swear i will draw googly eyed objects for my projects forever

What saves mario a little bit when dewign is concerned is that half the cast were created in the NES days. This meant three colors per character. How would you design a walking bomb in 16x16 3 color space?

On top of that, these basic looking characters are often treated as a race, so thers just no bob-ombs, we also have bombette for example. Also, they are redesigned eventually: see Mario Sunshine's bob-omb.

Now banjo, who had more ways of draw a character and still make them readable, just had random objects with eyes. I dont think its too fair to compare a n64 game with a series that originated in the nes. Its kinda like saying that mickey is boring compared to evangelion robots, in a way (if you know what i mean)

And even if you didnt consider the googly eyed characters, i can still affirm that humba wumba was an ugly piece of poop in the original game, before she got updated for nuts and bolts