I love it, the entire concept is really nice. Do you have any attack patterns in mind yet?
Only downside I see is that this must be a real pain to animate though.
Yes I have some in mind, including trying to bite the player and jumping above him in an arc while fireballs rain down. Pretty standard stuff.
For a sprite such as this, either having the texture applied to a 3D object, or dividing it in segments would be needed. For me to animate the frames for the individual segments (head, body segment, fire piece) would be piss easy, but I have no idea how the engine or programmer would pull off the movements.