Small things make a big difference.
Best Fiends is a connect-3-or-more Puzzle Game with RPG elements. The story is about a meteor crashing into Mount Boom, home to the slugs, which turns most of them into a vicious army that starts taking over the land of Minutia, home of tiny critters who fight back.
The goal of the game is to perform each level's tasks such as beating the slugs, matching enough specific blocks, breaking crates, collecting diamonds, making bombs explode, or any number of other things.
Made by Seriously with the help of Angry Birds developers.
Now has a followup, Best Fiends Forever, which involves travel through time and parallel universes. A second followup, Best Fiends Stars was later released, playing closer to the original game.
The series also has various CGI web shorts animated by Reel FX Creative Studios, which are released sporadically on the game's YouTube account.
This game provides examples of:
- A Day in the Limelight: Nine Fiendsnote have gotten solo mission packs, side quests that each feature only the respective Fiend as a playable character. Initially, they only had 20 levels and the prizes were diamonds, gold, and keys, but they've since been augmented to 30 levels with a new costume for the quest's main character at stake.
- Alliterative Name: Many things in the game are named according to this scheme.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: Some achievements, like finishing the solo missions or various daily challenges, will give characters costumes that give a 50 attack boost to the Fiend that wears them.
- Anti-Frustration Features: Failing a level multiple amounts of times will cause the game to put a permanent extra move into that level. Sometimes the level will be simplified so the level can be easier to beat, but no guarantee.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Long chains are not always the best ones, as even the game itself will sometimes tell you.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: Averted all the time, and often lampshaded in the process. (It's supposed to appeal to all ages!)
- Boring, but Practical: The Earthworms' special ability. They don't get a flashy bomb to stick on the board or a big animation to remove tons of pieces. All they do is shoot out a firework directly at a Slug. It doesn't change the board in any way, but it delivers a quick burst of attack power, which can be ridiculously useful in a pinch.
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: You can either earn the diamonds and "Meteormites"note or you can buy them directly with real money. Most of the time, you have to use real money to purchase in-game gold as well - this can be used to increase your health bar, give you infinite energy for a limited time, or buy extra turns if you run out and would otherwise lose a level - but very rarely the game will reward you with gold just for accomplishing specific things.
- Cartoon Bomb: A bomb in this style is the most commonly dropped reward item for filling out a Fiend's meter, which acts like another piece and deals heavier damage. There are a few variants on how they explode and take out pieces: horizontal, vertical, X-shaped, and a square. Rascal has a special bomb that shoots out two horizontal lines at once, while Thorn has the same ability that launches vertically instead. As well, some levels have a black bomb that can only be activated by another bomb, and doing so clears out the entire map.
- Cast of Snowflakes: The Fiends are like this, but the slugs aren't. While there are many different types of slugs, with more being introduced in specific updates for new levels, you'll run into many of the same slug, and they won't all be the same character.
- Cockroaches Will Rule the Earth: Lapoleon is said to be waiting for the day when he rules the world, anticipating this will happen.
- Early-Bird Cameo: Seriously's five year celebration video
gave early previews of three new Fiends: Ru the panda ant, Dougie the vinula moth, and Dina the Hickory Horned Devil. The latter was released just a week after this surprise appearance, albeit with a slightly modified design. - Evolution Power-Up: Every five levels gives each Fiend a new form.
- Guest Fighter: Labbit, up until he was pulled from the game in the Easter 2017 update for reasons largely unknown - Seriously have only said it was necessary to do so, being that he was "a unique case", but haven't specified why.
- Hero of Another Story: Various side-quests involve a quintet of earthworms that have their own slug-fighting adventures.
Beware - these levels can be quite tough. They would later be Promoted to Playable through an update that lets them join the main Fiends as a reward. - Holiday Mode: Certain holidays will create different events to play themed around the holiday for special costumes for Fiends, along with changes to the Slugs and soundtrack. The background of the hub world will also be added to as well at times.
- Idiosyncratic Combo Levels: "Well done!" "Fiendish!" "Fiendly!" "Slugmaddeon!"
- Incredibly Lame Pun: Lots, like Miles the Inchworm. Geddit?
- Money Grinding: Don't wanna cough up real money? Don't worry - if you play the Lootballoon just right, you won't have to. It takes awhile, but it works.
- No-Sell:
- Some slugs are immune to specific colors of block. If you're not careful, matching these blocks together for one of your moves against such a slug anyway can be costly.
- Inverted with the hairy slugs, whose color identifies the kind of block to which they are twice as vulnerable as other slugs.
- Our Product Sucks: The game has a Webby Award-winning commercial advising the players against their game, titled "Don't Download Best Fiends".
- Play Every Day: The game encourages daily playing, with a special daily calendar for prizes, a new on-map event almost every day, and various holiday events that give a special costume in an allotted time amount.
- Shout-Out: Has its own page for them.
- Speaking Simlish: Some of the characters, especially the Earthworms and Slugs during the side-missions, will speak gibberish with speech bubbles of what they're actually saying next to them during the level change scenes.
- Teeth Flying: Some slugs will spit teeth onto the board, replacing actual matchable objects - sometimes to the ire of the player who might have been trying to set up a match that was disrupted by this one tooth being thrown in. The teeth can only be destroyed by matching right next to them, or by lining them up in the blast radius of a bomb.
- Tertiary Sexual Characteristics:
- Sometimes all that separates the girls from the boys are eyelashes and/or lipstick. Brittle doesn't get anything like that till later on, and Karma doesn't get any at all.
- Complicating things further is Bam's final evolution: a big poofy ball with fabulous eyelashes.
