Plants vs. Zombies/YMMV

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Some players have pointed out that many plants are not very good except for a small handful, like Gloom Shrooms, Tall-Nuts, Cob Cannons, Blovers, and a small number of others, considering the mere amount of strategies that could be used to play this.
  • This often comes more from those who've scored over 150 flags in Survival Endless as to standard play, in which they find a specific strategy and stick with it.
  • Averted in the New Game+, where Crazy Dave will pick 3 plants at random that you have to use.
• Crowning Moment of Funny: "We are SO the undead!"
  • "The Dolphin is also a zombie."
  • The Dolphin saying "I'm gonna eat your brains."
    • The dolphin IS a Crowning Moment of Funny.
  • Not to mention the Help Section.
  • The original Dancing Zombies and his legion of backup dancers.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: It's all awesome, but particularly "Plants vs. Zombies"/"Zombies on Your Lawn". And as a bonus, the composer released a Japanese version.
  • Also in Spanish. It actually sounds great IMO.
  • The last stage of each lawn level, as well as the fight against Dr Zomboss certainly qualifies.
  • Also the mini-game music.
  • Brainiac Maniac and The Roof
  • The whole soundtrack is available for download from Bandcamp.
• Demonic Spiders: Gargantuars are large, powerful zombies that can instantly kill any plant (except the Spikerocks), are able to take a TON of damage, can survive instant-kill plants and can deploy a small, albeit weaker zombie deep into your defenses. Fortunately for you, they are kind of slow...
  • Giga-Gargantaurs are even worse. They take significantly more to kill, and have crazed red eyes. Notably, they were put into Survival: Endless because the regular ones were too easy for early play testers.
  • Those dolphin-riding zombies...
  • And the football zombie...
  • Pole-vaulting zombies are this until you realize that you can simply place the cheapest plant available in their path, causing them to waste their jump and slow down immensely.
  • The Jack-in-the-Box Zombie can instantly destroy your defenses.
  • Zombonis. They cannot be slowed by Snow Peas and Wintermelons, nor can they be stopped by Ice-shrooms or Kernel-pults' butter. They squash all your plants in the way and they are freaking fast! To top it off. They leave unplantable ice trail that needs to be melted with a jalapeno and said ice trail causes bobsled zombies to appear. Thankfully, Spikeweed and Spikerocks will finish them off in one hit should they run over one. And the ice disappears after a short period.
  • In "I, Zombie", Magnet-shrooms. They take away bucket heads, mining picks, ladders and football helmets, making many of your tougher and more expensive zombies get easily decimated. Starfruit and Threepeaters can attack other columns/rows, providing extra firepower and easily screwing up your imps should you choose to send them down a (seemingly) harmless row.
    • Kernel-pults, due to their random chance of throwing butter that stuns your zombies, can become these should the Random Number God choose to be nasty and cause them to constantly chuck butter. Coupled with snow peas that slow your zombies from reaching them, and you may have a nightmare on your hands.
  • Plants vs zombies2 adds plenty of more pesty zombies.
  • Acient Egypt
• Explorers are fast and can burn down plants with their torch, but they are frail, and you can extinguish the torch with ice plants
• The Torchlight zombie is an explorer with high health and moves fast. It can easily carve a path of destruction if you don't extinguish the torch
• Pharo zombies are covered in a very tough coffin that can survive an insta kill plant. If the zombie still has his coffin, then he can safely eat chili beans. Once the coffin is destroyed, you get a fast moving pharo zombie.
• Pirate seas

Barrel Rollers push a barrel that acts as a super tough shield and flattens plants. Its practily impossible to destroy with peashooters, and the barrel realeases imps when destroyed. Lobbed shot plants ignore the barrel and go straight to the zombie, and spikeweed( and bamboo shoot for chinese players) instantly destroys the barrel. Imp Canons fire imps near constantly, and they get in the way of non peiceing plants. If its not destroyed, it will self destruct and fire imps deap in your defenses. Also they are very tough

• Wlid West

Pianists will run over plants to kill them instantly, and they are very tanky. They will also caue any cowboys to randomly switch lanes. Thankfuly, spikeweed can destroy it instantly, and they are slow moving. Rodeo Legends will charge at lightning fast speeds, and can get to your house quickly quickly. They will destroy the first plant they meet and will hurl their imp far into your defenses. These zombies are very simliar to the bull, exept that they have much higher health, and can charge again, and they are fond of this. E.M peach is must when dealing with these enemies

• Ear Worm: There's a zombie on your laaawn...
  • The Disco Zombie's disco beat when he summons his backup dancers.
• Excuse Plot: See the main page quote.
• Fridge Horror: Why are there graves in my front yard?
  • For that matter, why do long-submerged, coral-covered zombies keep coming out of my swimming pool?
  • How about Disco Zombie's backup dancers? More and more backup dancers keep rising from the ground. Just how many dancers have been buried in the front yard?
• Funny Aneurysm Moment: The game was released in 2009. The Dancing Zombie originally looked like Michael Jackson. Six months after the game was released, the King of Pop died of cardiac arrest. Whoops. They ended up fixing this in a patch.
• Game Breaker: In the flash version's survival, the Fume-shroom and Sun-shroom combo becomes this at night. Sprinkle the cake with Grave Busters and Wall-nuts for success and profit.
  • Cattails in any pool stage.
  • The Gloom-shroom/Garlic combo. The garlic diverts the zombies down to other lanes and clustered up together so that the Gloom-shroom can blast them. This can eliminate at least of 75% of the zombies types in the almanac. Unfortunately, against Zombonis and Gargantuar...
    • Still works as long as you keep some one-hitters and a front row of Spikerocks as buffer.
  • The Spikeweed/Wall Nut combo. The zombies are kept on the spikeweed by the wall-nut, and the spikeweed destroys them with minimal losses.
  • Using the Hypno-shroom on any sufficiently powerful zombie. The Football Zombie is the most tempting target, though the Dancing Zombie is even better, with the back-up dancers also turned around. And the Jack-in-the-Box Zombie would mean no longer any risk of blasting your plants, and one free explosion against the other zombies if you're lucky.
    • Using Hypno-shroom on a Dancing Zombie in the iDevice version doesn't turn any already-spawned backup dancers tho, only newly spawned ones. Which makes the existing backup dancers Goddamned Bats, since by the time the Dancing Zombie is done with the backup that spawned behind him, chances are he's already out of most of his life (having being attacked by your plants before you hypnotized him of course). And he won't summon another set of backup dancers (which will be on your side this time around) unless he's been hypnotized for a while. This troper tends to lose his hypnotized Dancing Zombie before it would even summon new dancers.
    • Cob Cannons in Survival: Endless. With enough of them to continuously fire at regular intervals, one can go on indefinitely. Due to this, a cobless setup is a popular Self-Imposed Challenge.
• Goddamned Bats: The Bungee zombie drops down and randomly steals one of your plants.
  • Balloon Zombies, unless you planted a Cattail or put a Cactus in each lane. Otherwise, you have to plant lots of Blovers every time one shows up, or it'll float right over every defense you have. They're easy to stop, but when you're trying to get enough sun for something fairly expensive, it can get REALLY frustrating to have to keep using up 100 sun to stop them.
  • In the puzzle mini-game "I, Zombie" where you play as the zombies, the snow peas and kernel-pults are these. The snow peas slow down your zombies, and the kernel-pults will randomly stun them with a block of butter. Heaven help you if a kernel-pult and snow pea are in the same row, slowing and stunning your football zombie. While he's on a bed of spikeweeds.
• Hell Is That Noise: The sound of Pop Goes The Weasel signalling a Jack-in-the-Box Zombie. It's especially frightening the first time you hear it in the Fog levels because you can't see what's making that noise.
• Memetic Mutation: "We are SO the undead!"
• Most Annoying Sound: Dolphin squeaks will make you rage during the Pool levels.
• Nightmare Fuel: Jack-in-the-box Zombies. They explode too.
  • Especially if you are facing them in the fog levels where you cannot see where they are coming from.
  • "The zombies... are coming..."
  • Also, one of the "Brainssss..." sound sample, specifically the one said in a low creepy voice. The other samples, however...
  • "A huge wave of zombies is approaching... "
• Nightmare Retardant: The other "Brainsss?" and short "Brains!" sound samples, which are said at a notably higher pitched voice. It sounded narmish instead, like it was said by someone who got clubbed in the head shortly prior.
• "Stop Having Fun!" Guys: Mostly more from the people who've scored over 100+ on endless survival and have used specific plants tend to think that everyone else should play it according to specific strategies they used.
• That One Attack: The Zomboss battle can be summed up in four words: WINNEBAGO ATTACK FREAKING SUCKS!
• That One Level
  • Stage 4-10. The stage is in complete darkness which you cannot see your plants or the incoming zombies until lightning illuminates the lawn for a few seconds. It is also a conveyor level. You'll get to unlock the Yeti Zombie the second time you play it though.
  • Same thing for level 5-5, which is where you're fighting against oncoming waves of bungee zombies relying on nothing but Chompers, Pumpkins, Flower Pots, and Cherry Bombs. Crazy Dave sums it up at the start of the level.

Crazy Dave: You're gonna hate this level. It's one bungee zombie after another. I hate those bungee zombies. With a passion. And a vengeance. Here come those idiots now.

• • The "Survival - Fog (Hard)" level. "Hard" is a MASSIVE understatement. The fog levels are among the hardest in the game to begin with, but this one takes it Up to Eleven and beyond. If you pick your nighttime plants well, you can actually get fairly smoothly through the first six flags... but then the game will (as in, 100% guarantee — it's part of the level design!) send a few Gargantuars your way for flags 7 and 8, who will not hesitate to flatten your entire carefully-prepared yard without blinking an eye. The final waves become largely a Luck-Based Mission based on how many of your plants/lawn mowers survived.
    • It's quite easy if you use the right strategies. Cob Cannons are practically required for Survival modes just to take care of Gargantuars. Spikerocks on the front column o two can slow down the gargantuars and deal some good damage to other Zombies coming your way too.
  • "Column Like You See 'Em" and "Bobsled Bonanza" are two mini-games that mostly rely on what plants come up next (and they are difficult). The former, for instance, will only give you Flower Pots and Pumpkins right when the waves of Gargantuars start swarming you.
• The Tetris Effect: Don't worry if you can still see the plants when you look away. That's perfectly natural. If you start seeing zombies, go see a doctor.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks: The reception to the Game of the Year Edition update which changed the Dancing Zombie (after official objections from the estate of Michael Jackson) from a blatant reference to Michael Jackson's Thriller video to a Disco Dan.
  • Though, the new disco zombie is at least amusing, and makes for a clever Visual Pun regarding disco being... well, dead.
• The Woobie: The Wall-Nut starts off looking more than happy to protect the lives of its planter and comrades, but when the zombies begin to devour him and his smiles slowly disappears, you can't help but feel sorry for him.
  • A single tear begins to stream down Tall-Nut's face when he gets near the end of his health. Apparently the game's composer and a few beta testers would protect Tall-Nut with a Pumpkin because the tear made them feel bad for poor Tall-Nut.
    • Although the Tall-Nut tear is more of a manly tear.
• Ugly Cute: The zombies.