Holy shit

That RATM was really ahead of their time

I am taking this stupid children's game entirely too seriously but I genuinely do really like the first game a lot and mostly enjoyed my time playing 2.

There's also segments in both games where the opposite happens: You have a new gimmick or threat, albeit easy enough to establish how it works without feeling oppressive, and then the game gives you a tool to work around it like "That sucked, right? Thankfully you can fight against it"

And then with each new stage you could analyze what enemies were coming up and plan accordingly to the enemies' weaknesses.

And with all the new plants that have come out since then, that seems like it just goes right out the window.

Like, PvZ2's Lightning Reed is a great example of that: You get it in the old west for a stage, and then the next stage you're introduced to the chicken wranglers, an enemy that the reed is extremely good against but is tough to fight otherwise. I think that's a very smart design.

I think a great thing about the first game (and the second game mostly) was that each plant was meant to serve a specific purpose. Like yeah there were some "general" plants that you kinda always wanted, but many plants you get synergized well with the enemies you'd encounter in the stages.

"Esoteric" was probably not the right word, but there's so many plants where the number of effects they have is just ridiculous.

There's a plant that can swap elemental stances, chill and freeze enemies, is immune to fire damage, deals double damage to chilled enemies, and can leave fire panels

Like most plants are a simple "I can do this single thing"

And then there's a plant like Tomb Tangler which can only be planted on tombstones, absorbs the stones for health, makes a slowing fog and has a 50% chance to instantly kill an enemy, what the hell

Holy shit they added an element system of sorts where you have "Power Mints" that will buff other plants, but only specific plants belonging to that family. I'm caught between "that sounds sick actually" and "who asked for this, I just want to talk"

Like okay keeping this game on life support has to be the only reason the franchise even still exists at this point, because the remake of the first game is a mess, PvZ3 keeps soft launching and then being taken down for adjustments, and no one gave a shit about the last shooter.

I'm looking at some of the plants that came out in the like eight years since I played through the game and man shit's wild

They have a leveling and upgrade system now for some reason? And a lot of the newer plants either seem to be straight up upgrades or just weird esoteric shit