Fancy Pants Adventures is a series of Platformer Web Games created by Brad Borne
. The games concern the titular Fancy Pants Man, a stick figure with orange pants running around on various random adventures, such as trying to awaken an angry giant penguin (in World 1, [remix]), taking back his stolen ice cream from a greedy rabbit (in World 2), rescuing his little sister Cutie Pants from pirates (in World 3), or fighting off an invasion of ink monsters (in Super).
While it started out as a web game on Armor Games, Kongregate and Newgrounds, it eventually made its way to the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade and earned its own website here. The downloadable game was eventually rereleased free, but without multiplayer aspects or the time trials, as World 3. The downloadable game has also been released as an iOS game.
For the 2014-2015 winter, the spin-off Fancy Snowboarding was released.
Fancy Pants Man is also playable in Newgrounds Rumble (as of its May 30th, 2008 update) and Shift 3 (as a New Game Plus Secret Character).
The Fancy Pants Adventures series includes these games:
Web Browser Games- Fancy Pants Adventures: World 1 (2006)
- Fancy Pants Adventures: World 2 (2008)
- Fancy Pants Adventures: World 3 (2012) — An online version of the story levels from the 2011 console game.
- Fancy Pants Adventures: World 1 Remix (2014) — A remake of World 1 with updated gameplay features and some new levels.
- Fancy Snowboarding (2015)
- Cutie Pants Adventures: World 1 (2020) — A remake of World 1 starring Cutie Pants.
- Fancy Pants Adventures: World 4 (2020) — An online version of the story levels from Super Fancy Pants Adventure.
Console, Mobile, and PC Games
- The Fancy Pants Adventures (2011 on PSN and XBLA, 2012 on iOS, 2017 on Android) — A Compilation Re-release of World 1 and 2 with additional story levels, multiplayer mode, and time trials.
- Super Fancy Pants Adventure (2017 on Steam, 2018 on iOS and Android)
- Fancy Pants Adventures: World 1 Remastered (2020) — A downloadable version of Cutie Pants Adventures that adds back in Fancy Pants.
- The Fancy Pants Adventures: Classic Pack (2024 on Steam) — A Compilation Re-release of Worlds 1-3, World 1 Remix, and Fancy Snowboarding.
The games provide examples of these tropes:
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The series as a whole
- Ambidextrous Sprite: If Fancy Pants Man falls asleep facing left, the 'z's that float up turn into 's'es.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: Fancy Pants Man can collect more pants colors.
- This is more difficult than it sounds, in World 2, as the only way to collect them is to haphazardly kick a bouncy snail shell into a golf hole, often having to drag the shell over the whole level.
- Anime Hair: Fancy Pants Man's Spiky Hair.
- Art Evolution: Borne posted a YouTube clip of the many rough drafts of the Fancy Pants games, lamenting over their lack of quality. Each game since the first has progressed in variation, detail (like Squiggleville), and animation. Even for a stick figure, Fancy Pants Man has evolved significantly from his original incarnation.
- Benevolent Architecture: Many of the locations just happen to be perfect for performing reality-defying stunts while still acting as a coherent platformer.
- Bottomless Pits: In the first two games, falling into a pit immediately takes a life away. The second game's snail-shell can be lost to these pits, requiring Fancy Pants Man to reroute to put the snail shell in the golf hole. The third game is more infrequent and forgiving with bottomless pits, being nonexistent in primary levels.
- Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Thanks to a reconstructed physics engine, the physics in World 1 Remix and Super are more 'floaty' than the physics in World 1, World 2, and World 3. This can lead to players failing to run through ledges where momentum in later games would allow them to do so.
- Depth Perplexion: Some objects look like part of the foreground or background but can be interacted with, like the cardboard box in World 1 or the tree trunks in one of World 3's challenges.
- Easter Egg: Starting in World 2, ducking several times in a row makes Fancy Pants Man make the "devil horns" gesture (giving the impression of headbanging).
- In World 3, Fancy Pants Man can Goomba Stomp Rainbowbeard while he's in the middle of his speech. This causes him to immediately drop to the next stage.
- Excuse Plot: Present in all three games:
- World 1: you're trying to wake up and fight a giant penguin.
- World 2: you're trying to take back your stolen ice cream from a rabbit. note
- The Fancy Pants Adventures (or World 3): The king's bathtub is stolen. Get it back. Later on, Cutie Pants is kidnapped.
- Flunky Boss:
- The rabbit from World 2 drops down spiders and snails when it hops, which allows Fancy Pants Man to kick the snail shells back at it.
- The pirate captain in World 3 does this unintentionally when ninjas enter when he jumps, but his beard-wave dispatches them soon afterward.
- Follow the Money: Borne intended Squiggles to show the player the certain paths to take on various levels as well as being the standard-fare collectable. In World 3, microtrials require these paths to be taken and Squiggles collected in the right order within a certain time frame.
- The Goomba: Spiders.
- Goomba Stomp: Fancy Pants Man's main method of dispatching enemies. Starting in World 2, stomping only stuns enemies, and he has to defeat them by running into them to kick them offscreen. World 3 has some microtrials where this is required.
- Heroic Mime: Fancy Pants Man, barring the "Ow!" he makes when hit by an enemy.
- Idle Animation: After being left around for a while, Fancy Pants takes a comb out of his pants and combs his hair, accidentally turning into an afro. After a longer while, he stretches, yawns, scratches his back, and eventually falls asleep.
- Law of 100: Collecting 100 Squiggles gets Fancy Pants Man an extra life.
- Losing Horns: The descending notes variation plays upon the loss of a life. Averted in the console version of Adventures/World 3.
- Le Parkour: Exaggerated; not only can Fancy Pants Man wall-jump, perform backflips, and hop from platform to platform in the course of normal gameplay, World 2 has an area in level 5 where he runs continuously while completely upside down.
- Non-Lethal Bottomless Pits: In challenges that have bottomless pits, falling into one just returns Fancy Pants Man to a checkpoint without losing health or lives (though timed challenges will continue without making up for lost time).
- Nonstandard Character Design: Until Super, Fancy Pants Man and Cutie Pants were the only stick figures in a non-stick figure world.
- Playable Menu: The main menu is a small box where Fancy Pants Man can navigate and open the doors to the various sections of the game.
- Promoted to Playable: After being a
planned playable character in World 3 and being an NPC in Super, Cutie Pants eventually became playable in the World 1 remaster. - Secret Level: Ubiquitous in every game.
- Shout-Out: The games' design started as a cross between the Super Mario Bros. series and Sonic the Hedgehog series, as most prevalently displayed in World 1, but the gameplay developed separately and uniquely.
- Spikes of Doom: Normally nonexistent, but World 2's Afro Ninja course and the bottom of a section of a challenge area in World 3 has them. They become a regular feature in Super.
- Springs, Springs Everywhere: Frequently used to get to high places.
- Stick Figure Animation: Not that the animation is bad; Borne takes much effort in animating stick figures and non-stick figures.
- Stock Sound Effects: Plenty of them that add to the whimsy of the game.
- Time Trial: There is a speedrun timer in World 2 in the Trophies + Colors room, and microtrials count how quickly Fancy Pants Man completes them in World 3.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Ice cream is first shown as the food of choice in World 2 as a Fancy Golfball reward. Newgrounds Rumble shows Fancy Pants Man being lured into the Newgrounds realm with a fake 'Free Ice Cream Day', and Cutie Pants requests rainbow-flavored ice cream in World 3. In Super, an ice-cream vendor lets you jump into his cart and collect ice cream cones for power ups.
- Wall Jump: A staple ability of Fancy Pants Man unlocked in World 1. Starting in World 2, he can use this to slide up greased walls. "Why be realistic when you can be fancy?"
- Wheel o' Feet: The unreleased, early versions of the first game had this in lieu of an actual running animation.
- Winged Soul Flies Off at Death: Whenever Fancy Pants Man dies, his angelic soul with halo and wings will leave his lifeless body and ascend to heaven saying goodbye to his dead body. Remix and Super avert this though.
World 1, World 1 Remix and World 1 Remastered
- Adapted Out:
- With the version's title being renamed to "Cutie Pants Adventures: World 1", the online version of the World 1 remaster removes Fancy Pants Man completely, with Cutie Pants taking her place.
- Trophies were removed completely in the remaster, being replaced with either pages of Cutie Pants' diary (if playing as Fancy Pants), or additional colors for your clothes (if playing as Cutie Pants).
- Advancing Wall of Doom: The wall-jump secret area employs ink in the form Rise to the Challenge.
- Airborne Mook: The bat-looking things in World 1's final stage.
- Collection Sidequest: The trophies. The remaster replaces them with pages from Cutie Pants' diary. Getting all of them unlocks her as a playable character.
- Bullfight Boss: The penguin. It even makes bull horns with its fingers.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Unless otherwise stated, these can also apply to World 2 and the console recreations of the first two games.
- There's no given plot (not even an Excuse Plot), with no explanation on why Fancy Pants Man is fighting the Angry Penguin.
- You can't earn additional colors for your pants. You're stuck with what colors you start with.
- There are actual trophies hidden throughout the level. Only World 2 would continue using these. World 3 would instead use stars, and Remix and Super would instead have additional colors and designs for your pants. The World 1 remaster would replace the trophies with either pages of Cutie Pants' diary (if playing as Fancy Pants), or additional colors for your clothes (if playing as Cutie Pants).
- Fancy Pants Man has to earn the wall jump move from completing a secret area. Later games would give him the wall jump from the start.
- Smashing Hallway Traps of Doom: One specific section does this with ledges, where ending up squeezed between them depletes Fancy Pants Man of health. Thankfully, there are notches in these ledges where he can remain safe while he jumps to the next one.
- Videogame Cruelty Potential: There are several spots in World 1 where you can make poor Fancy Pants Man bounce his head on the ground.
World 2
- And Your Reward Is Edible: Double-subverted: The mayor of Squiggleville offers ice cream for Fancy Pants Man's Fancy Golfball skills, but it gets stolen by the Angry Rabbit. Fancy Pants Man then spends the rest of the game getting back that ice cream.
- Brick Joke: A Bat Spider appears in the background of one of the stages. In World 3, the Bat-Spider is one of the challenge givers.
- Chekhov's Gun: A pencil appears in the first few moments of the game as a golf club for Fancy Golfball. The pencil would return in Newgrounds Rumble and World 3 as a weapon.
- Corridor Cubbyhole Run: A between-level stage has this, with moving platforms pushing Fancy Pants Man back acting as the object to avoid.
- Down the Rabbit Hole: Literally. Fancy Pants Man jumps in after the Angry Rabbit and virtually the entire game takes place in the rabbit hole's surreal environments.
- Hornet Hole: TommyLM's level in the game is a beehive, with what looks like saddled, fez-wearing bees acting as moving platforms.
- Human Cannonball: There are cannons placed here and there to give Fancy Pants Man a gigantic jump boost.
- Item Get!: Parodied when Fancy Pants takes the ice cream and announces "Ice cream get!", while the Mayor wonders "Why do they always say that?"
- Record Needle Scratch: When the Angry Rabbit steals Fancy Pants Man's ice cream.
World 3 and the console game
- Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole: The online Flash version's squirrel rewards Fancy Pants Man with "a squirrel-y prize", which is a dark-green pair of pants. How is that squirrel-y? The console versions have instead as a reward an acorn-shaped hat, much more relative to squirrels than a forest-like green.
- Adapted Out: Pretty much everything except the main story campaign was removed from the online Flash version. This also applies to the Classic Pack re-release due to it being based off said Flash version.
- April Fools' Day: In 2017, Brad posted a mockup of the console game being available on Google Play, passing it off as an April Fools joke. Subverted in that it turned out to be an actual teaser for the game's Android port, with the port being released to the public a month later.
- Be the Ball: In multiplayer, a player can kick another player crouched into a ball to get him or her significant height and speed.
- Rolling Attack: Possible to do as well, even in single-player by rolling down a slope.
- Big Fancy House: Guess whose?
- Brick Joke: The Bat-Spider from World 2 returns with a role in the game.
- Broken Bridge: The pyramid of enemies in the pirate ship prevents Fancy Pants Man from continuing the game until he reroutes to find a weapon suitable for falling them.
- Captain Colorbeard: Parodied with Rainbowbeard. He, other than his initial name, dyes his hair and calls himself Captain Manly Beard.
- Charged Attack: The longer the player holds down the attack key, the more Fancy Pants Man charges the swing from his pencil, and the more damage it will do to enemies. For aerial attacks, the duration of the attack extends as well, which can be improvised as a Double Jump or a way to remain in air.
- Creator Cameo: Brad Borne (or at least, his speech bubble) appears in the third game when Fancy Pants Man takes the pencil Borne had out to draw World Four.
- Cute Bruiser: While annoying and distressed at first, Cutie Pants is no slouch in following her brother's fanciness.
- Cute Kitten: Kabootle to Rainbowbeard, which distracts him from escape.
- Discontinuity Nod: One of the NPCs in Bummin' It Beach mentions the lack of a blue (challenge) door, which would be available in the console versions, but not the PC one.
- Distressed Damsel: Cutie Pants. By the time Fancy Pants Man finds her, she's become captain of the pirates who kidnapped her, and decided that she'd rather be a pirate princess than be rescued.
- Drowning My Sorrows: Rainbowbeard does a G-rated version of this with apple juice after being kicked out as pirate captain.
- Expressive Accessory: Rainbowbeard's hat.
- Fang Thpeak: The Bat-Spider in Misplaced Cave engages in this.
- Frothy Mugs of Water: Apple juice in place of an alcoholic drink.
- Guide Dang It!:
- The console's tutorial, thanks to players trying to rush through it, has a part where Fancy Pants Man is meant to run and slide past a dummy enemy. Many players who do not take the time to read just end up being knocked back and running past it with Mercy Invincibility. Borne gives a Player Nudge in the PC version, where the ceiling of the area is too low to just run past, so the player must slide to continue.
- It's entirely possible to finish Pirate Cove without going through half of it. After Fancy Pants Man collects the pencil, he can return through the entrance rather than continue upwards. It might not be entirely obvious that the 'dead end' in the area can be broken by using the pencil.
- Girlish Pigtails: Cutie Pants has a pair.
- Hammerspace: Fancy Pants Man's pants can hold a pencil that's almost as tall as he is.
- Improbable Weapon User: Fancy Pants Man uses a pencil. The customizable weapons in multiplayer can give him even more ridiculous weapons.
- Invisible Block: Squiggles line invisible blocks in Ninfestation that lead to a hidden star.
- It's All Upstairs From Here: The level section that leads up to Cutie Pants. When Fancy Pants Man eventually reaches her, a Trap Door is opened, undoing all of his progress and forcing him to find another way to reach her.
- Loads and Loads of Loading: Present; while the loading screens aren't too long, moving from one area to another rather frequently compound the time waited at these screens.
- Meaningful Background Event: A bunch of springs, Squiggles, and a star can be seen in the background of the latter half of Squiggleville. They correlate with an accessible, but inconspicuous area.
- Message in a Bottle: Cutie Pants' method of communicating with her brother, even if she's still on land. These bottles can be collected and read for 100% Completion.
- Nonindicative Name: Cutie Pants wears a dress.
- Offscreen Start Bonus: This trope is discussed in Pirate Cove, where an individual in the wall of enemies comments on how moving left from your spawn point would be completely unintuitive to continuing the game.
- Painting the Medium: Cutie Pants' text in the console game is pink, compared to the normal black of everyone else's.
- Pass Through the Rings: Yellow Squiggles in microtrials.
- Power Dyes Your Hair: Inverted, as when Rainbowbeard dyes his hair, he becomes (or at least, feels) more powerful.
- Remixed Level: The second time you return to the Piraty Princess Ship/Ninfestation, it's been overrun with ninjas.
- Shout-Out:
- The fighting controls for the pencil reflect those of Fancy Pants Man's combos in Newgrounds Rumble, since Borne designed every aspect of his inclusion in that game.
- In the island level, you have to collect the Mystical Hair Dye of Norris.
- Socialization Bonus: Some material in each level that are relatively difficult in single-player become trivial when multiple people join and interact; for example, jumping on another person to get to a star that's just out of reach rather than starting from a distance away and timing jumps for maximum height.
- The Spiny: Some spiders (and pirates, some of the time) cannot be Goomba Stomped upon easily; this encourages use of the pencil, which is easier to use than a fast jump or slide.
- Spoiled Brat: After Cutie Pants usurps the pirate ship's control, she asks for lollipop swirl gowns, unilammas, rainbow-flavored ice cream, among a 1200-number long list of wants.
- Star-Shaped Coupon: Present as collectables on every level.
- Super Not-Drowning Skills: In the Pirate Cove, Fancy Pants Man never needs air when he's diving. Borne says that this was intentional, as he wanted the water level to be fun, rather than That One Level (as is often the case).
- Temporary Platform: Thin sand platforms in Bummin' It Beach crumble when Fancy Pants Man steps on them. The thicker ones, oddly, do not.
- Thundering Herd: The big cloud of pirates that decide on kidnapping Cutie Pants as their new captain.
- Unmoving Plaid: Justified for the more complex colors of pants, as animating every stripe and dot at 30 frames per second would be incredibly difficult.
- Unwanted Rescue: Cutie Pants finds reigning over pirates better than she thought; she repeatedly demands that she won't return home. After all, why would she be subject to Fancy Pants Man's annoyance when she could have independence at her whim?
- Virtual Paper Doll: The console versions allow players to customize Fancy Pants Man with various pieces of headgear, various styles of pants, and an assortment of odd, aesthetic weapons.
Super Fancy Pants Adventures
- Evil Twin: The Big Bad is an ink-covered version of Fancy Pants.
- Giant Hands of Doom: The first boss is a giant ink blob with two floating hands that try to squash you.
- Heel–Face Turn: Captain Manly Beard is now an ally of Fancy Pants, helping him get to the volcano as reward for freeing him and his crew.
- Lethal Lava Land: The volcano, only with bubbling ink in place of lava.
- Roger Rabbit Effect: The final level takes place in a live-action desk after Evil Fancy Pants tosses you out of the game's world, which apparently takes place in a paper drawing.
- Sequel Hook: After defeating the final boss, he throws Fancy Pants into the floor, and the only way out is a portal in a piece of paper. Jumping into it leads to a To Be Continued screen, and the game resets to the beginning.
- To Be Continued: The final level ends this way.
- Up the Real Rabbit Hole: In the final level, Fancy Pants is pushed off the edge of a cliff and ends up in a drawing desk, where he has to fight an Evil Twin.
