PvZ RTA Questions & Answers

PvZ1 Single Segment RTA FAQ

Q: What? Plants Vs. Zombies? REALLY?

A: Yes. I like this game and i want to speedrun it.

Q: Isn't this a glorified autoscroller game? Every level is on a timer!

A: This is incredibly incorrect. No level is on a timer. The game keeps track of your level progression at the bottom right, and the faster and sooner you kill zombies, that progress bar advances faster, and thus more zombies spawn. If you take long to kill a zombie, it'll take longer for another one to spawn and it'll take longer for the level to progress. In short, killing zombies quickly makes you progress quicker.

Q: Why do you choose to run a New Game file when you can just run NG+ and already have all the plants at your disposal? IT'S EZPZ!

A: This is for a variety of reasons. First off, there is no such thing as a New Game+ run. Once you complete Adventure Mode once on a single save file, every subsequent playthrough on that file adds the gimmick of Crazy Dave pre-selecting 3 plants for you at the beginning of EVERY LEVEL. Due to a lot of the nearly 50 plants you can encounter on an Adventure Mode playthrough being extremely situational or downright useless, Crazy Dave's plant picking RNG can choose absolute shit plants depending on the level and pretty much wastes 3 seed slots that could've been used for something else. This category is referred to by me as CrazyDave% and i probably will never do it.

You CAN make the argument that the game goes a whole lot quicker BECAUSE you have all the OP plants at  the start of the game, but, again, the category doesn't interest me enough to the point where i actually want to do serious attempts for it. Another reason for why i prefer New Game over NG+/CrazyDave% is because you get new plants as you go, making you constantly have to change strategies for every level, as well as adapting to new zombie types and your limited number of seed slots to somehow make it through the level intact. This adds another layer of depth to the run, in my opinion.

Q: What's the world record for this game?

A: I honestly don't know. The fastest known time for a single segment Adventure Mode run is 5:24:31 by SDA forum member mattBLiTZ, presumably on the Nintendo DS version of the game, however nobody knows what the fastest PC time is at all since nobody runs this game.