>>11815965
By the time of the SFC remake they were portraying the DQ2 protagonists as taller and less childlike than the original Famicom version. The same happened with DQ3 and it's remake.

Dragon quest 4 already had a taller, more grown up looking protagonist on the Famicom, so actually I suspect the shift in how DQ protagonists were depicted coincided with the time skip in Dragon Ball that led to Goku becoming tall, which happened shortly after the release of DQ3.