Since I focus more on the endgame content in PvZ2, I'll drop in some thoughts from my experience since I am not a 'casual' player per se. Apologies in advance if I repeat what someone else mentioned, but I just want to be thorough since the answer isn't really all that simple. 1) Scaredy Shroom is pretty good in Arena since of its powerful PF effect (it isn't as terrible in that sense as one may initially assume) 2) Arena is def weird. A lot of people think its P2W and the best strategies involving killing zombies as fast as possible with the zombie 'spam,' but this is not the case most of the time. There is something we call score decay, where you need to keep killing zombies at a constant rate to keep the difficulty level of zombies as high as possible so they drop more points. Killing a wave of zombies too fast means that this constant rate is lost, and the difficulty level drops, resulting in less points. 2a) You really do not need a lot of high mastery plants (Aka it isn't really P2W). You can still score high with high level or even low-mid level plants; it just comes down to optimizing your strategy and understaning how arena works (like understanding score decay, but that isn't so much of a concern with lower level plants where your damage output is lower).. 2b) For the most part, the zombie layout in each tournament and the map layout is slightly different, though they do rerun older tournaments. 2c) Unlocking the new plant at 500 crowns is a bit tedious, and long ago, this amount was lower. But, if you can win consistently (even with low level plants) and use your free plays every day, you should be able to reach 500 crowns by the end of the arena season. 3) Plant of the week lines up with the plant family featured in the ongoing arena season. For example, as of me writing this comment, the current arena season features the Conceal-Mint family, and the 4 POTW are all conceal-mint plants. They are sorta random, but we datamined these plants; Check the PvZ2info wiki if you want to see this. 4) Penny's Pursuit can be quite difficult, even with max mastery plants (in partiuclar, the begouled blitz levels), but given how the gamemode alongside Arena is designed for higher level post endgame content, this isn't too surprising. You can watch Darren-G if you want to see some guides with level 1 plants. 5) You can easily unlock new plants by playing Penny's Pursuit with the zomboss fights. You get less seed packets with an easier difficulty, but you can easily get enough to just unlock a plant. You could also unlock plants with the Rent-A-Plant feature by replaying adventure levels over and over, so waiting for it to be featured isnt a concern. 6) Overall viability of new seediums is def inconsistent. Some plants are just outright better than others, so I don't really have anything to 'argue' against this. Though I will say, once you level up primal potato mine, its range can hit all 5 rows if you place it in the center row, so that can be very strong versus teleportato mine.
No casual player is gonna waste weeks to get a plant that has shitty animations and some lame power just to grind even more to get more seedpacks and level it up, and its like every month, its repetitive, boring, and brain smother
Question: is their any method to farm certain premium plants without arena and plant of the week/penny pursuit events? Reason I ask this is because that often I find the POTW to be something I’m just not at all interested in unlocking, so most of the time it’s just waiting for the plants I actually have an interest in to come by and be featured.
ok so I believe the reason why the new plants look so off is because of the lack of easing. Its an animation term for how, in real life, when living things move, its not at a constant rate. for example, if you move your arm, right as the movement ends, your arm starts slows down to prepare to stop. That, i believe, is whats causing these new plants to look badly animated
So you’re basically saying the reason why the animation feels off, is because it’s a sudden stop in animation. like it’s not slowing down as it naturally should, so it looks kinda uncanny compared to plants back when the game was new.
As someone who uses flash/adobe animate (the same program the PVZ2 plants are animated in. I THINK!) it’s definitely because they didn’t add any easing… which is awful considering that, in flash. you can add an ease to a tween in your animation within the span of 3 seconds or less. I’m not joking.
Erm, actually, the reason the animation is different from the older animations is because the original animators from Popcap left. 🤓👆 But that can also be a reason too.
In arena mode, you’re not fighting an actual player or a bot you’re just fighting someone shadow stats. Meaning that you’re trying to beat the score they had gotten before
I always had that suspicion that it was shadow stats. Especially since you can just pause in the middle of a match. It was too suspicious to believe you are fighting other players in real time
Dude the effort and quality of the new premiums are decreasing so much you can literally tell with no effort. Like for example, if we look at the animations from the old premiums like homing thistle or shadow pea, we can see it that the animation actually looks natural and unique. Then we look at electric peal. The animation is even an animation. They just fucking streatch the plants out and call it a day. And for their abilities, they copy the ability from an adventure plant and then buff the absolute hell out of it
many of the plants that were made prior to arena (as well as a small selection of arena plants) were animated by Liam Robinson. He actually has a youtube channel called Liam Automated Animator. Seeing all of the quality animations done by him and then looking at the crappy animations of the modern plants is like night and day.
There are some modern plants that I do really like, such as the heath seeker. I do mostly agree that most plants are just unfitting. They're either way too broken or severely underpowered with rarely a middle ground.
In my view, the plant that should be back is Umbrella Leaf. Because its function is simple but useful. Can deal with multiple projectiles and zombies. It's sad they don't care about this plant
@@CreeperPlayesMCDoom Shroom is the perfect example of what an Arena plant is like, and yet they don't do anything with it. Umbrella Leaf would work amazing too, mostly because screw the octo zombie. They're both great candidates, but we all know PopCap is just gonna make a dumb 0 sun insta that destroys the whole map instead of doing things well
Also a big problem for me is, once i get the plant, *what do i do?* The only gamemodes are arena, penny’s pursuit and campaign (which I’ve already completed). The game turns pointless. What’s the point in getting that plant?
@@tpfoxCastroadd new difficulties for adventure bronze level two zombies gives a bronze star next to level when completed silver level 3 zombies gives silver star. Gold level 4 zombies and veterans gold star. Mastery no leveling no premium gemiums seediums or mints no power ups and no mowers with level 4 zombies. Gives a taco and 10 seed packets related to the word.
My main gripe with newer plants is that their animations reek of lesser quality. Compare how most newer plants are animated (in general) to how the older plants are, you might see what I'm trying to say. As for balance, lol idk I haven't touched the game in 4 years
The plants they added after MD finish simply dont serve no real purpose, they are either OP or simply useless or redundant additions eating up your precious storage.
I’m an animator, and the reason the new plants look so badly animated is because of a few reasons. One reason is the lack of anticipation and timing before they fire their shot and do their idle animation. With a plant like Peashooter, you can see him swing back and forth with a small slow down as his swing comes to a peak for around half a second, and then he speeds up to swing backwards. For a plant like Scaredy Shroom, however, he swings around at a constant speed. Another reason is the lack of easing. I’ve seen another comment talk about this, but there is a heavy lack of easing. For that Dragon Fruit plant, they swing their head around, reach a peak in their swing, and then immediately swings his head back around with no buildup to it at all. The last thing is that I think they’re too scared to have really fast animations, like with that one bamboo plant. He thrusts his spear forward like he’s poking something with a toothpick and not stabbing a zombie heroically. i did not mean to write an entire essay for this
About writing the essay. Dont be ashamed, i am guessing you are an animator, I'm an animator too and we are passionate and should express the technicality of such things, its really nice for people to understand these things, and you explained it well in a short manner.
There is actually a reason for the animation quality completely differing from older plants to new ones. In Danerade’s video about PvZ as a whole, he mentions how major team members of the art direction for PvZ 2 left the project, so Popcap had to get more guys for it. And they did not even TRY to recreate the old artstyle as you can see.
two plants are currently shown to be released at some point, the Guard Shroom and the Aqua Vine the Guard Shroom is probably the strangest plant to look at, animation and design, even mechanically its so strange while the Aqua Vine is well, a new vine (which tbh i’m happy for cause we do need some new vines after a while after Shine Vine) and it looks decent
Seed packet unlocks are definitely FAR worse than paid plants. It’s pretty obvious that they make them hard to unlock as bait for you to buy seed packets in the shop, which end up being incredibly expensive, to the point where it might cost 20 dollars to get a plant rather than 5. Sure, you can technically unlock plants for free, but I don’t think that’s how they really designed it.
My main problem with game is a fact what it's weird arena-penny pursuit cycle, because where is no others gamemodes there you even can use theese plants, i suppose most players just leaving game right after completing adventure
It does suck when some of the new plants like Pokra and Ice Shroom are overpowered like the Metal Blade from MM2 which makes old plants obsolete. I still like them but I only use them because I haven’t tried them in a while and give them a break by using different plants so it won’t become stale. Great and valid video dude.👍
Ok, I understand your point, but honestly, I love the return of sea shrom I love her in the first game and I will love her in the second, I don't care if sea shroom does the same or if she is useless (also, her design is so cute) GO AHEAD SEA SHROOM🥺!
I agree with you on arena because at max it gives you only 1 plant in a month and you have to work for it really hard that it's not worth it. But I definitely disagree with you on Penny's pursuit. It's way easier method of unlocking plants. It changes every week so you can get a new plant more frequently. The way you obtain it is through getting 250 seed packets. All you need is fight dr. Zomboss 3 times on level difficulty 2 which will give in total 45 seeds (15 seeds each fight). Overall, it's just 6 by 3 fights with Zomboss. You just have to use a good strategy to win him all the time. You can update bowling bulb till level 3 and pile turnip and take them. This combo generates lots of dmg because bowls usually reach the boss. As a defensive plant you can take explod-o-nut.
I thought they "stole" the plants from chiness version cause the animation when I just replay this game after 1 year ago.I also get shocked when the first time I saw chili pepper, tomb tangler, bean sprout...... This is absolutely a horoor game now.
Yeah i agree that Vamporcini is terrible and imo it deserves a buff by making the health drain more consistent and that on higher levels it can drain the HP of the zombies much more faster and get much more health but especially when on defensive mode it should start swallowing their HP if it’s getting low on health and the plant food should be that it swallows all the HP from the zombies around it and gets a defense boost.
I think scaredy shroom is pretty powerful because it's plant food effect, all 9 scaredy shroom plant food simultaneously can melt almost any zombie in 3 lanes.
5:10 its not a bot, its the ghost data of someone else who played arena. also nice im not the only person who refuses to levelup my plants from pure spite! :D
The fact that in the background gameplay I can't name half of the plants and/or their effects tells about how much unecessary plants they're shoving in it
The main reason why i prefer modded version od pvz2 like PvZ Reflourished isn't because of new worlds or different zombie AI it is because in Reflourished you have some levels on worlds after Zombos and you can unlock premium plants like Electric pea and etc. Everything is free 2 play and it gives vibe like pvz1. Edit: And you can actually play it in 60fps like in the good old times instead of locked 30fps.
I wish that PVZ2 could have you make a feature The feature is, you can choose the level of your plants but you can make your max level bigger by collecting seed packets. This means that if you have a plant at level one, you can only have it at level one. But, if you have your plant at level eleven, you can choose the level of it between one and eleven. It's like you can upgrade you max level but still choose it to be level one because it makes the game more fun. This is probably going to make PVZ2 fun because it allows experienced players to be able to feel the spice of difficulty in the game everybody loves.
Hell yea! I went back to gaming it these days, but brooo the list of plants we need hell to acess is so huge. A shame they focus on quantity over quality
whats worse about arena is that they completely removed gauntlets from the awards so free to play players are either forced to watch several ads or wait for a free turn, not to mention candies are completely useless now you can’t buy anything with them and serve no purpose
quite a well made video but the script (if you even used one) felt a bit too improvised, but keep it up! i love seeing smaller creators get some videos that do well, and seeing how your views on this vid is already on the 6 digit mark, that's really good
To me it feels like arena would be so much better if you didn't have endless lawnmovers and the difficulty increased overtime. The winner would not be decided by points, but how long the player lasts the onslaught. Once one player loses the match ends simple as that.
I think instead of reworking pennys persuit they can add a feature to under level your plants when you upgrade a plant the plant ti level 2 they can add a bottom to make it to level 1
the thing is popcap has a "another location" in the world located in hydrabad this is because ea layed more off of the seattle studio completely making 20 in a half people in the studio so thats why
I'm just glad Mega Gatling Pea isn't animated like the most recent plants, since it's just a Peashooter copy, and yes, a Peashooter, not Repeater, Peashooter
I think that many new plants just do not have purpose. Some of them don't help to beat the levels, while others are way too powerful making the old ones useless. Take shadow-peashooter, for example. It damages all the zombies on a line like lazer bean but makes more damage, slows the zombies, can swallow 2 zombies into the ground when powered and costs cheaper by 75 suns. Even with moon-sunflower, they will cost 175 which is less than 200. Or grapes that, in addition to doing an area damage as cherry bomb, also throws these grapes. What the point of the cherry bomb then? Basic plants, like peashooter, aren't used at all. Mints are broken. You can plant 1 spear-mint and summon 5 spikerocks each of which will have 5th level. Then why do you need spikerock itself which costs 225 on level 1 when you can take 1 spear-mint for 0 which will give you 5 of them? This is way too broken.
@@leomassafm160 And it enrages me when I'm forced to upgrade peashooter to level 2 cuz tutorial. xtroyr, try planting your sun producers often and on the right and your attackers on the left.
I love that seedium plants are insane and op, but.. - Premium Plants (Paid Ones) are sometimes worse than Seedium Plants -Seedium Plants are WAYY to hard to get; miss that plant during arena, take months to get one plant.
The worst experience I have ever had is losing save data, it won't save on google play, won't save on EA registered, the game got crash and lost everything, second play again got update lost again and crash. I hope the third won't happen again
Back when i was 9 , i used to get so excited when they announce new plants or new other contents. Then suddenly everything went downfall after modern day
With arena I am fairly sure that the other person is always a bot, because you are able to rent a plant beforehand in the planting phase, you can pause mid match and it actually pauses, and you would be unable to do they with a real player
@@CreeperPlayesMC only reason I play it is to get the plants, because some of them are genuinely busted. I came back to the game this year for nostalgia, and I had not played since you could access every world for free. And I was very surprised how many premiums I missed, and I was very confused about not being able to go to every world. Also there are so many fucking ads now
for sea shroom and scaredy shroom, they simply dont fit the game, sun is much more plentiful with 50 sun being the base, and scaredy shroom was meant to work with a 25 sun meta when the sky didnt drop sun, its a budget plant in a game where sun spam is so rampant its worse in all cases. also sea shroom, it could have theoretically worked if they were drop dead easy to unlock, or in big wave beach, but the same issue stands, if they add more worlds then it could work better, and i think they try to do this with events but it more ends up shoving stuff down your throat also if seediums were 100 packets instead of 250 it would be MUCH better imo and pennys pursuit shouldnt have been built around leveled plants, i can do 1-2 usually, occasionally difficulty 3 if i get lucky, but you can do pennys pursuit over and over for the plant, or buy plant of the week packets in the shop, i think pennys would be fun without leveling (and zombie spam being replaced with something fun) but a good way to deal with treadmill zombie is 2 mega gatling peas and a plant fooded torchwood. which is stupid, 950 sun and a plant food to kill a track zombie over a fair bit of time! all of that just to one lane! its very stupid. also different scaredy vs fume and puff could be up to og pvz1 team being behind fume and puff, but not og pvz1 team being behind scaredy
It just sucks how many of these plants would have made perfectly fine world plants. Like imagine a second night world (that actually doesn’t give you sun, I’m looking at you, Neon Mistake Tour) that’s a water world, like the night pool levels in PvZ1. It could include Sea Shroom, Scaredy Shroom, and a couple other water and shroom plants like Nightcap and SeaFlora. Maybe it could be based on the Viking Age or something
BTD 6: We aren't bringing back Bloonchipper because it's so unbalanced. PVZ 2: Scaredy-Shroom. Ice-Shroom. Sea-Shroom. You want it? It's yours my friend. As long as you have enough money.
There is nothing to use them on. No new maps. No new zombies. No new mechanics that juxtapose with new plant mechanics. There’s no feedback. It’s DLC to help you finish a game… that’s already done.
Fun fact: the reason new plants look different from old plants are because the old plants are drawn using shape tools, while new plants are drawn with strokes
@CreeperPlayMC aww man... I got 50 seed packets of gold bloom from luck'o the zombie event. I thought i would have gotten it... Thanks anyways but whats a gemium? Is it like a premium?
Scaredy Shroom is actually not that bad. I use it very often in the Arena when there's no jester zombie. The plant food power is so powerful when paired with tile turnip. 2 tile turnips is enough to get high score in the Arena
@@SheranTraplock Iceberg lettuce’s plant food is literally an ice shroom effect. And it costs…. NOTHING. Even with scaredy shroom’s plant food effect, there are many other plants who have far better plant foods that can cheese levels. Scaredy shroom should absolutely never be used.
@@ARandomUserOnlinewhat? You have an idea to make it usefull bc for me if it useless let it be useless i will try to make it usefull im just appreciate what people make
Just gonna say this, out of the mordern PVZ2 plants, I like one of very fondly: Meteor Flower They are pretty balanced like, yeah if you have a row of them... yeah that will anhilate any zombie, but that aplies to most plants, and still for a post game point of view, pretty balanced I'd say Also their design is great, and even if the animation is a bit weird, I do think it doesn't matter too much, their size is a little too big, I will adimit it Meteor Flower is probably the best seed packet plant we are getting for a while, and I very happy it is them
Imagine giving ea money or playing arena when you can just edit the game files to abuse zombie diamond drops and the unlock plant feature. Though you still gotta grind arena to actually level up the plants unless someone figured out a way to do that via files too that idk about. I do agree with this video though, and without file manipulation I doubt i would have ever gotten some of my fav plants due to how flawed obtaining premium plants is rn.
I myself have manipulated the files to get certain plants, etc. I know it's not exactly right to do that but some plants I couldn't obtain with the fact that a lot of them cost money or have an excessive amount of diamonds.
Id argue abilities are more unique, look at guard shroom and dragon bruit, dragon bruit spawning babies on death and guard shroom spawning mini ones that count as a vine so they dont even take up a tile, their designs are poopoo but they still have a lot more uniqueness
I don’t think expansions will be good, the expansion levels that are already in the game are stupid and just encourage the player to upgrade their plants
Ngl scaredy shroom is for me very usefull for penny and arena like even at lvl 1 on arena when you fill 5x3 and you add tile turnip in midlle 2 4 line and use plant food on tile it do so much damage. At arena boss figth eazy 26m points
there is an internal reason why the animations are looking off, and it was shown in a long pvz documentary with the old and current devs being interviewed. its due to EA as a whole using more contractors to work. in the case of pvz alot of them came from overseas, so some of these people are doing this for the first time with a new environment. and contractors are meant to be short term workers, so with new people coming in and experienced people leaving, your bound to be stuck at a certain standard. but theres also no insentive to improve either because of the amount of money the plants make reguardless
Many people are complaining about the new plant's animations and I perfectly agree but there's a detail I want to focus on more...The new plants just DON'T fit the game's artstyle. Like, look at the adventure plants or old premium/seedium plants, they look perfectly normal and. Now, majority of the plants look so...Weird. I don't know how to explain, the porpotions are weird, the thickness of the lines is weird, eyes and so much more. Mega gattling Pea is one of the few recent plants that is saved from that and the reason seems obvious
I’m pretty sure the animation is worse because all the animation work is outsourced overseas to India (or another country where work is cheap). Popcap has very few employees left IIRC, and most of them are working on PvZ3, so there’s no in-house animators for PvZ2.
Cant wait for a plant that needs 500 seed packets to be unlocked and has the same purpose as peashooter but with a different art style and an animation where it barely moves
1:53 Bro wtf are you talking about ? I love this plant! Its cheap, combination of little offense and defense, good of clearing ealry zombies of some levels.
