User blog:Mental Skillness/hey fellas what happened to pvz2's art team? (WARNING: Long Rant)

(this is a ported post from r/plantsvszombies) oh yeah and spoiler warning as this includes content from pvz2's upcoming content page.

you know, i always pretty much hated pvz2's art style since the start because it looked really cheap and artifical but somehow it got even worse.

so a lot of the newer plants recently discovered look pretty awful. i'm no character designer but this just looks like goofs lwb would make for fun using the pea model than actual character designs.

i like modern day's characters, there's some kind of theme, they dont reuse assets and they look somewhat distinct. i kind of liked them despite me not liking the style. heck a lot of characters that came after modern day looked pretty okay. i actually enjoyed hot date's design the most out of 2017's roster.

then somewhere down 2017 and onwards is when the art department kind of started looking a bit questionable. solar tomato is probably the biggest offense to the art quality, since the body was a circle and the face looked so pieced together (the animation even looked like a test bouncing animation i remember having when i installed flash). when i saw it, i thought it was from pvzcc, it looked like a mismash of assets from other plants.

then the power plants update came out and the artwork for the banner didn't look awful but whoever the artist was for the poster didn't really draw the characters that well off model which boggles me because theyre really simple characters. and then after that we got holly barrier which still looked okay. now, we get into the garbage.

as of 2018, if i'm correct, no premium plants have been released but we've gotten mints. the mints' designs? they look passable but they look so phoned in. i like how they have these unique color and theming to themselves, but some of these were already established. i could sum up all their designs as passable, but just not very inspired. also, this is kind of a strange issue i had for a style that bases itself off of bright colors and shiny plastic look but a lot of the designs felt really monochromatic and shared colors way too similar.

http://prntscr.com/kl0mud to put it all in summary, if you look at the mints here, a majority of them just share this dark green color palette and the design of the character makes the green ones look very samey with little to define them. and the others? they're definitely more eye catching but they're based off of existing characters in pvz2, so it devalues that a lot.

now for the bottom of the barrel comes the plants in development. i have a gut feeling that popcap has been hiring amateur artists to get around because the quality of the art has sunk and there's currently as of now 5 plants that have been revealed in the span of 2-3 months. reminder that is how many plants they released in the entirety of 2017.

but back on topic, the peashooters are the biggest issue here. the obvious reason they're doing this is because all the artists have to do is get the flash model and screw around with it, which is simple and why i dont like seeing too many peas but snap pea, minipea, shadow pea, and goopea have all been datamined in a few months, which really says a lot.

and for the peas that do have final character designs, here they are; http://prntscr.com/kl0o9z

these look awful. the only one that looks like that took any kind of particular effort was the pea mortar, whereas even pvz heroes' art team managed to make a |better character design like this more than a year ago.

like i said when i started this rant, these look like goofs lwb would do for fun, not real final character designs. the obvious use of reused models is so obvious, the artist didn't even bother to correct the gradients with the shadow pea's snout. and goopea looks straight out of pvzcc.

with so many characters made in so little time,could |this lolwutburger goof made years ago possibly be our next premium plant?

to put it in tl;dr - The characters have been looking less and less professionally designed, and 2018 has been an all-time low for this. check the links in blue for reference. thanks for those who read either the tl;dr or the whole rant! :)