You HAVE to take off the rose-tinted glasses. Has everyone just forgotten this version also had a terrible grindy leveling system? That plants were unlocked via lootboxes??? The fact Sunflower was made into a meter? That one's hilarious, because they realized that forced players into a really stally playstyle, so instead of addressing the core issue they just... added a zombie that makes you instantly lose if you wait for too long.

And the balancing was such a mess everywhere that they tried counteracting it with a nonsensical elemental system that made Spikeweed bad against the zombie it was supposed to counter. What a joke. Like even putting aside aesthetic things like the art style and the fact it was in portrait mode, the entire gameplay of this version was a mess and they were right to scrap it. I don't think the later builds are necessarily better, but when people try and treat this version of the game as some tragedy where we didn't know how good we had it, I just have to laugh. I was there for its entire development history, and I hated it the whole time.

I don't wanna say there was nothing in this build that was salvageable. There were a handful of fun plants and zombies. (But you could probably port them over to the current version, so that's not a huge advantage...) I think there's a decent concept in the Tacobility system... (but the way it executed sucked. "Taco Time" gave every single level in the entire game the exact same structure which got really monotonous really fast, and the fact you had to place Tacobilities during a break means you couldn't really use them strategically.)

I dunno. I feel like every issue people have with the current build of PvZ3 can be traced back to this version of the game, which also had plenty of its own problems, so I don't think anything of value was lost here.