Board Thread:Biweekly discussions/@comment-26239911-20190827201336/@comment-27385163-20190828074720

As somebody who takes an interest to art, cartoons and simple character design, I have a lot of commentary on every art style.

I think my personal favorite is the original Plants vs. Zombies because it's so timeless and iconic and is the root of inspiration for all the art direction in the franchise, 10 years later. PvZ1 engineered adorable, iconic characters and one of the most recognizable zombies in video games.

I love the little hand painted quirks on them, and despite the quality of the art in the game itself not aging the best 10 years later, it's still charming and nostalgic to me. The game's art direction took more advantage of the humor and the fact Plants vs. Zombies' premise was a parodyand it didn't take itself seriously, and it made the game surpsisingly approachable, coupled with the cute plant characters and the original game was an overnight success.

Plants vs. Zombies 2 is objectively pretty up there. While, I can't say this for the more recent character designs, the tone in the art had changed tremendously. All the art opted for a very cutesy flash look, different from the black outline hand drawn look of the original but still very much polished and a welcomed successor.

It changed a lot that its original predecessor had and it had a different tone and sense of humor, but I think that's a great thing. It manages to be its own thing and seperates itself from its predecessors and cleans up all the designs for a very modern cartoon look. The game also has some really cool character designs that differ again in tone compared to its predecessor. It also has probably the best animations compared to all the hand drawn entries.

Plants vs. Zombies Heroes is also really decent. I think visually it's more appealing but it has more of a nostalgic look. For those who don't know, a lot of comic book scans will often get weird static and stuff on it and the artists captured that by embedding a texture into the artwork. The art style uses a more toned down color pallete and is generally more relaxed. It looks great.

The game, while looking visually the best I think has the best character design but I can't really say they capture the traditional style of PvZ characters when it comes to its characters, but it's still really well done and unique. The only big criticism is that the artists heavily based a lot of style on PvZ2's art style which personally subtracts a bit from when I saw it for the first time. Didn't quite 'wow' me.