post #3128934 post #1846380

Ridley is a high-ranking Space Pirate, the archenemy of Samus Aran, and one of the most common recurring characters in the Metroid series, appearing in every Metroid game except for Metroid II: Return of Samus, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, and Metroid Prime Hunters. Ridley's appearance is considered similar to a skeletal pterosaur with glowing eyes. Ridley is known for being very defiant and persistent; though Samus has defeated him many times, he always manages to return and do battle with her, either through his healing abilities or robotic enhancements. As such, Ridley is fittingly referred to as the Cunning God of Death in his Zero Mission official art. Ridley is considered the main antagonist of the series, despite not typically acting as such in any individual games.

Despite his fearsome and bestial appearance, Ridley is known to be highly intelligent, and is shown to even be capable of speaking in the manga; with his intelligence, he was also evidently capable of building a synthetic construct made in his own image. He is known to have a bloodthirsty personality and takes great personal enjoyment in destruction.

Though Ridley often appears in different forms, it is clarified through scans found in the Metroid Prime series, as well as events portrayed in Metroid: Other M, that every one of his incarnations chronologically seen prior to Other M and Metroid Fusion are indeed the same individual (the exception being the Ridley Robot) despite his numerous defeats. Strangely, some of his prior battles ended with his body seemingly exploding, but in-game lore states he survived these violent defeats until Super Metroid. In most games he appears in, he has been the penultimate or ante-penultimate boss.

The manga also has revealed that Ridley is extremely adept at survival. Ridley was apparently capable of healing his wounds by eating human flesh, as illustrated in the manga in a part where he claimed that he survived the destruction of his flagship by consuming the bodies and cells of the dead humans in K-2L.