LMAO

Edit: I was expecting a massive takedown of my opinion, very gratifying to see so many additional points and things I missed. Never expected to be in a 66nj video.

The maps in GW is so much better than in GW2. There was a time when I just went to a Garden Ops just to explore them and look to the details, they are truly beautiful. My absolute favourite was Main Street not only because of visuals, but also because of gameplay. It's a shame that we ain't get a zombified version of this map in GW2 rather than brain dead Wall-Nut Hills.

Here's my counter argument: "I'm a gnome, yes I am a gnome" 🗣️🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

"Y'all got better gameplay than gw2?"

"We got charm and soul"

Yknow, I fully believe this franchise would be flourishing if it wasn’t for the thing known as

“Change for the sake of change.”

Another subtle thing about the GW2 maps, I remember when I first got GW2 I could never find the portals on the turf maps for the life of me. Whether this is because of bad spawn locations, bad portal placements or the maps being cluttered, idk.

A game with GW2’s gameplay with GW’s charm, soul, and map design  of GW then it would be perfect
That’s what I want in a GW3

I always felt like I was wrong for calling GW1 my favorite. At the end of the day it is. I don’t think GW2 is bad or its art style is terrible.
GW1s style is just better stylistically and is way more charming. It was magical to see such a faithful adaptation of the 2d PvZ characters in 3d. Seeing the world of PvZ 1 expanded with new locations and scenarios.

The artstyle definitely got less cohesive when it came to the western maps because of all the Zomboss technology but the actual locations like the golf courses and trailer parks work really well for a realistic/griddy look on the world.
PvZ 1 and GW1 are a griddy exaggeration of real world architecture. It’s so beautiful and man the charm that comes off every single texture is amazing.
I seriously wish we got private play in GW1 so I could just go into the Garden and Graveyard maps and explore them. As a kid I would boot up Garden ops and not plant a garden.
I would just explore and pretend I’m a person walking around town.

Something I rarely see mentioned is that both games have a fundamentally different gameplay/playstyle.

GW1 is an asymmetrical shooter, the plant team is designed to be defensive while the zombie team is designed for offense. The plant team is the one with the dedicated sniper and melee classes, while zombies have a tank and rapid fire attacks. Obviously there were variants that were trying to fill the missing roles of the team but they often weren't as good as the dedicated classes from the other, like compare camo ranger with camo cactus, the latter is much more powerful in their purpose.
Since GW2 added gamemodes where zombies are on the defense, they had to add defensive classes for zombies and offensive classes for plants, which effectively makes it much more symmetrical. Super Brainz and Captain Deadbeard are very clear equivalents to Chomper and Cactus, while Citron and Kernel Corn are the same to All Star and Foot Soldier. Having more content is nice on paper but this just makes both teams feel much less distinct from eachother.

There's also the issue of the returning content... GW1 to GW2 made a lot of fundamental changes to the gameplay (other than the symmetrization of the teams), and most of the GW1 content was ported as is, so a lot of the GW1 content really doesn't work well in the GW2 gameplay. I think this is best shown with examples.

In GW1 you can only naturally regenerate up to half of your health, and a lot of the game is designed around that.
Health and healers matter a lot more, which is partially why they were given such strong offensive capabilities. Armored characters also exist to counter that.
There are abilities, mostly the swappable ones, that trade damage for quantity. For example multi rocket and potato nugget mine are extremely useful against targets that are on half health.
Electric and Toxic damage can deal chip damage to targets you didn't directly hit, which is incredibly useful because if that damage is dealt to targets with more than half health, it cannot be naturally regenerated. Fire damage is also relevant in this case, like if you hit a target and they go into cover.
There's also the case of different map design. Maps in GW1 are much smaller, which for example makes abilities like turbo jackhammer and sprint burrow viable if it's mainly to use them to get from place to place.
With the fundamental changes to GW2 like letting you regenerate to full health, many of the things mentioned above range extremely situational to downright obsolete, they were simply designed for a very different game.
It's also really exemplified in wall nut hills (watch Robunna's video on it), it has many issues that extend beyond it being a very rough port, that come from the changes that were made between the games.

Obviously this isn't saying one has better gameplay than the other, just that they both have much different game design than people often say, and GW2 suffers from a lot of returning content from the first game not accounting for it. The thing that puts me off from playing the GW games anymore is how "meta" they've become, everyone just plays the same few strongest characters and if you don't you will severely underperform.
All this makes me really appreciate BFN being a soft reset, starting from scratch let them give the game a consistent direction, and it's a shame that the game was killed before they could add more than one proper character to it. You can really tell they tried to address the problems the garden warfare games had, even though they unfortunately ended up introducing much of it's own...
(seriously, why did they scrap damage falloff of all things???)

On the topic of coins, GW2's coin system is very different and simplified than GW1.

In GW1, your performance determines how many coins you get at the end. Every little thing you do that gives you coins, that's what adds up to the tally at the end.

In GW2 multiplayer games [Ops and Boss Hunt excluded], you get a thousand coins for every minute spent playing the game (You lose some by switching teams or being AFK), you only earn more for winning and/or capturing the objectives.

Other than that, every player earns the same amount of coins per match and given how easy it is to rack up coins just by playing the game, they had to up the sticker pack prices.

Very small nitpick I have with GW2 is that the damage indicators for electric variants force you to squint your eyes to see how much damage your doing, since the light blue number on a bright background makes it extremely hard to see the number. GW1's electric damage indicators were black with a neon blue outline, which not only makes it so much easier to see the damage number, but also just looks so much cooler. The fact they changed that in GW2 makes no sense whatsoever and always annoyed me.

The real reason GW1 is better is because the Zombies have good beards

There's no Mob Cob in GW1, so this is invalid

The real reason GW1 is better is that you can use a workaround to play it on Xbox One without Xbox Live, but this doesn't work on GW2

Gw1 cons
No shareds Vanquishes
worse balancing
More suppressive meta (I find it easer to counter toxic brainz and e-pea than commando and toxic
dead lobbies
less characters
Insta respawn vanquish canceling
Zombies are stronger than plants and win like 65% of the time
That thing were when you reload it jolts you out of zooming
No private play (I care because mods)
Not on steam (I care because I can't get ea play to work)
Way worse leveling system
No zombie ops are solo campaign or trials of gnomus
Its dumb how character upgrades work (You get them randomly in packs)
8 less classes (dont forget torch wood and hover goat)

Pros
Promote characters (Chester and berry) ((I LOVE citrus cactus)
Better maps
Better art style
Better cosmetics
Nostalgia
Harder ops (not necessarily a good thing but I like it)
No manual denotation variants

Ok but theirs no gnomes

I feel that the difference in art style and atheistic between gw and gw2, is the same jump between pvz1 and pvz2

Actually 66 the reason that Wallnut Hills isn’t available in private play is because Popcap couldn’t get the ai controlled players to work properly on the map and knowing EA, Popcap never got the opportunity to finish that so they just made Wallnut Hills unavailable in Private play :b

everytime i look back to gw i miss berry shooter broooooo

1:49 this shit GENUINELY scared me so badly.