Starting in mid-2017, Seriously Entertainment teamed up with animation studio Reel FX Creative Studios to create web shorts for Best Fiends.
Each short look into a snippet of Minutia. Whether looking at the lives of the Fiends, the Slugs attempting to thwart them, or a combination of the two, they highlight the personalities of the characters that are only small blips in the game.
The web shorts often connect with the game, having their own page in the app to watch them, along with various challenges around the time of release that give trivia questions related to the short.
The shorts themselves can be found on the game’s YouTube account, the playlist containing them can be found here.
Shorts in the series
- "Boot Camp" – Released May 25, 2017
- "Visit Minutia" – Released September 1, 2017
- "Fort of Hard Knocks" – Released July 18, 2018
- "Baby Slug’s Day Out" – Released September 13, 2018
- "Howie’s Gift" – Released January 10, 2019
- "Temper’s Adventure" – Released June 27, 2019
- "The Immortal Cockroach" – Released September 12, 2019
- "The Fight Before Christmas" - Released December 5, 2019
- "King Slug Industries" - Released January 9, 2020
- "Slug Swap" - Released May 29, 2021
- "The Demon of Sweet Street" - Released October 22nd, 2021
- "Temper's Adventure 2: Part 1" - Released January 10th, 2022
- "Rumors" - Released June 3rd, 2022
The shorts provide examples of:
- A Day in the Limelight:
- "Boot Camp" and "Fort of Hard Knocks" focuses on the Slugs, only having the Fiends show up at the very end. Meanwhile, "King Slug Industries" doesn't feature any Fiends, only focusing on the Slugs.
- "The Immortal Cockroach" focuses on Lapoleon, with him being the only Fiend in the short.
- All-CGI Cartoon: The series is done in all CGI, in contrast to the game’s 2D style.
- Animated Adaptation: Of the Best Fiends game.
- Assassination Attempt: The plot of "The Immortal Cockroach". The Slugs have a crack team of assassins sent out against Lapoleon, who they have mistaken for the Fiends’ leader. Unfortunately for the Slugs, he’s unkillable, being a cockroach.
- An Ass-Kicking Christmas: "The Fight Before Christmas" features Howie up against Slug Nick in a kung fu-esque fighting scene.
- Bad Boss: "King Slug Industries" reveals that King Slug is not a pleasant guy to work for.
- Bad Santa: Slug Nick, on principle of still being a slug, is not a nice guy, and ends up attacking Howie. However, the other Fiends still see him as an average Santa figure, so they aren't too pleased with the resulting carnage.
- Big Fancy House: "The Immortal Cockroach" reveals that Lapoleon lives in one.
- Camera Abuse: The shorts love this trope.
- "Howie's Gift" ends with a botched magic spell launching Howie into the camera, slowly sliding down in pain after.
- "The Immortal Cockroach" starts to end the same way, with an explosion launching Lapoleon into the camera. Instead of reacting in pain, he simply peels himself off, dusts himself off from explosion ashes, and walks away as if nothing happened.
- "The Fight Before Christmas" ends this way, with the other Fiends throwing Howie out to the front yard for the Slug-mas kerfuffle.
- Christmas Episode: "The Fight Before Christmas", in a parody of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas.
- Diegetic Switch: In "The Immortal Cockroach", Lapoleon puts on an instrumental record of "La Vie en Rose" in the beginning of his introduction scene. It then switches to the background music for the majority of the short afterwards.
- Failure Is the Only Option:
- According to "Boot Camp", the slugs flat-out set themselves up to fail and get defeated by the Fiends. Those who succeed at the slugs' training gauntlet will simply be put through it again only to get walloped worse than they would have been if they had just failed the first time.
- In "The Immortal Cockroach", every attempt to off Lapoleon by the Slugs is thwarted by pure luck, along with Lapoleon just straight up being unkillable.
- Hidden Purpose Test: The short "Howie's Gift" tells the story about how Howie, the wizard lizard, managed to get his "greatest gift" when he was younger, going through three tests to prove that he is brave and kind of heart to earn a power beyond his wildest dream. It turns out he was always a wizard. The gift was how he got his British accent.
- Leaving Food for Santa: "The Fight Before Christmas" has a plate of cookies left out for Slug Nick. He eats them all in one go and smashes the plate over Howie's head.
- Magical Profanity Filter: Howie has a very bad cursing problem, and for the sake of Kwincy, he has the ability to self-censor himself. This means a lot of censor bleeps in his vocabularity.
- Retraux: "King Slug Industries" uses old VHS effects for the orientation film and credits, to fit the "poor working environment" of the company.
- Shifted to CGI: Inverted, "Slug Swap" changes to a flat art style, compared to the CGI style of the previous shorts.
- Somebody Set Up Us the Bomb: Hank and Roger's scheme in "The Immortal Cockroach", posing as delivery men to give Lapoleon a delivery. Lapoleon's more irritated at how cliche the "bomb trick" is, rather than it being a bomb in itself, since he's immortal.
- Sound-Effect Bleep: The episodes bleep out Howie’s swearing, referencing how he’s forced to self-censor himself around the others thanks to his bad mouth.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: A majority of "The Immortal Cockroach" has the Slugs accidentally offing each other or themselves during their attempts to do the same to Lapoleon, all while all a bright and jazzy instrumental of "La Vie en Rose" plays in the background.
- Standard Snippet: "The Immortal Cockroach" uses an instrumental of "La Vie en Rose" through the short, fitting Lapoleon’s French manner.
- Tampering with Food and Drink: In "The Immortal Cockroach", one of the attempts to off Lapoleon is a plate of poisoned fruit. The fruit itself is obviously wrong, coated in an obvious cloud of green poison, but Lapoleon, being a cockroach, eats it no problem and belches out the poison. The Slug that was attempting to poison him is dumbfounded, and eats a remaining single cherry to see how he failed, only to immediately keel over.
