What if Peashooter joined Super Smash Bros?

EA has footballers, soldiers and galaxy-saving heroes. Somehow, its best route into Smash might be a pea-firing garden defender.

If Electronic Arts finally earned a playable fighter in Super Smash Bros., Peashooter would look like a punchline.

That is not necessarily a weakness. This is the series that once revealed Piranha Plant with a straight face, after all. Smash has never been particularly interested in respecting the corporate hierarchy of video game characters. Sometimes the mascot gets the invitation. Sometimes an anonymous enemy, plastic peripheral or fitness instructor wanders through the door instead.

Electronic Arts itself has been part of the industry since 1982, growing into one of gaming’s largest publishers across sport, racing, shooters, simulation and role-playing games. PopCap came from a very different corner of the business. Founded in a Seattle attic in 2000 by three veterans of the dot-com era, the studio built its reputation on accessible games such as Bejeweled, Zuma and Peggle before Plants vs. Zombies arrived in 2009.

Plants vs. Zombies was another brilliantly simple idea. Zombies advance across a suburban lawn, plants hold the line, and increasingly ridiculous gardening solutions prevent somebody’s brains from becoming dinner. Peashooter sits at the centre of that formula, firing directly along his lane while Sunflowers generate resources, Wall-nuts absorb punishment and Crazy Dave remains exactly as helpful as Crazy Dave usually is.

EA acquired PopCap in 2011, framing the deal as part of its wider digital expansion. Plants vs. Zombies subsequently became much more than a tower-defence series. The original Garden Warfare passed one million players only months after its 2014 launch and had reached more than eight million players by late 2015, giving PopCap ample reason to push its strange experiment further.

Garden Warfare 2 followed in February 2016 with more character classes, larger battles and the Backyard Battleground hub. More importantly for our purposes, it cemented Peashooter as a proper third-person shooter combatant rather than a plant permanently attached to one square of grass.

That game has shown remarkable staying power of its own. EA was still updating its PC version with new anti-cheat technology in March 2024, eight years after release. Battle for Neighborville continued the shooter branch, while Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted returned to the original formula on 23 October 2025 across platforms including Nintendo Switch and Switch 2. Plants vs. Zombies 3: Evolved then entered Early Access in April 2026, beginning in Ireland and the Philippines before expanding through a limited number of other regions, once again putting lane-based strategy at the heart of an active PvZ project.

Bizarrely, EA already has some minor representation in Super Smash Bros., although it comes with one of those technicalities seemingly designed to ruin trivia nights. Dr. Wright from the SNES version of SimCity has appeared in Smash as both trophy and Assist Trophy material. SimCity is now an EA-owned universe, but Dr. Wright was created for Nintendo’s adaptation and is generally treated as a Nintendo-created character inside that very strange loophole.

Peashooter would therefore not be Smash’s first brush with an EA-owned universe. As of the current roster, however, he would be its first proper playable fighter drawn from EA-owned IP.

That leaves him in a wonderfully awkward position. Peashooter is not EA’s biggest character, nor is Plants vs. Zombies its most prestigious franchise. He is not even a traditional protagonist. Yet once the question shifts away from corporate hierarchy and towards who could actually work in Smash, the little green plant starts causing problems.

Why Peashooter Should Stay on the Lawn

The first obstacle is almost embarrassingly obvious.

Smash already has a plant.

Piranha Plant was not merely an unusual Super Smash Bros. Ultimate newcomer. Its reveal was arguably the biggest curveball pick Smash has ever produced. Mario is one of the grandest franchises in the medium, overflowing with heroes, villains and decades of familiar faces, yet Nintendo somehow reached into the Mushroom Kingdom and promoted one of its generic carnivorous plants instead.

That precedent helps Peashooter because it proves a species does not need an elaborate biography to earn a roster slot. It also means the novelty has already been spent.

Peashooter and Piranha Plant are hardly identical, but the visual comparison writes itself. Both are green botanical oddities built around oversized heads, thin stems and extremely questionable mouth situations. To somebody unfamiliar with Plants vs. Zombies, another plant-shaped fighter risks looking less like a bold roster expansion and more like Nintendo accidentally watered the same idea twice.

There is also the question of whether Peashooter is even the right representative. Crazy Dave has considerably more personality. Dr. Zomboss brings villainous spectacle. Sunflower is enormously recognisable. Peashooter, by comparison, is deliberately basic.

That simplicity is part of his appeal. In the original game, he communicates the offensive premise almost instantly: place him in a lane and he fires at whatever approaches. He became recognisable because the idea is so clean, not because he has decades of dialogue and heroic monologues waiting to be adapted.

Then there is Electronic Arts itself.

Its sporting footprint alone is enormous. The former FIFA series, now succeeded by EA Sports FC, and Madden NFL both sit among EA’s biggest properties and among the most commercially recognisable sports series in gaming. EA Sports has also spent decades covering sports as varied as ice hockey, golf and mixed martial arts. Need for Speed gives the company another enormous long-running franchise before we have even reached the rest of the catalogue.

Outside sport, the list barely gets easier to summarise. The Sims represents life simulation on a scale few series can match. Battlefield and Apex Legends cover two very different approaches to multiplayer shooting, while Mass Effect carries an entirely different kind of science-fiction prestige. PopCap brings Bejeweled and Peggle into the family too, while EA Originals has published games such as Unravel, It Takes Two and Split Fiction.

Against that background, choosing Peashooter sounds almost wilfully strange. Imagine announcing that Electronic Arts had finally joined one of gaming’s largest crossover rosters, only to reveal that Commander Shepard, a Sim and some of the biggest sportspeople on the planet had apparently lost the company vote to a plant that says nothing and fires peas from its face.

Technically, peas are legumes, but that probably makes the explanation worse.

There is also the sheer weight of the EA name. Peashooter would not arrive as an isolated PopCap character; fairly or otherwise, he would be treated as the playable representative of a publisher associated with everything from annual sports releases and sprawling simulation games to military shooters and galaxy-spanning role-playing adventures.

That tension is not entirely unlike Mr. Monopoly’s Smash case, where the character himself is almost less important than the enormous identity he is being asked to carry into the roster. Peashooter at least comes from a video game first, but representing the wider EA catalogue through one lawn defender would still be a remarkably strange promotion.

That is a lot to place on the shoulders of a character who does not technically have shoulders.

Please Do Not Make Him Piranha Plant With Ammunition

The character-choice problem is only half of it. Peashooter’s defining action is shooting horizontally, and Smash already has enough projectile users to make that sentence slightly threatening.

A bad Peashooter moveset is painfully easy to imagine. Shoot peas, retreat, shoot more peas, then occasionally remember that Plants vs. Zombies contains other mechanics. Few things drain the charm from a fighter faster than discovering that their entire strategic philosophy involves standing on the opposite side of Battlefield and making everybody else deal with it.

That interpretation would also make the Piranha Plant comparison worse.

Piranha Plant is an eccentric close-range creature built around biting, extending and exaggerated Mario enemy behaviour. Peashooter should occupy almost the opposite territory. He is not the plant that wants you standing beside him. He is the plant trying to make the space between you increasingly inconvenient.

There is a real distinction there, but only if the moveset commits to it.

Peashooter needs to control space without becoming tedious, remain recognisable without becoming simplistic, and move around a fighting stage without forgetting that his original claim to fame involved being firmly planted in one patch of grass. Merely giving a projectile character good frame data would not solve any of those problems. The design needs a rhythm: establish a lane, complicate the approach, reposition, then decide whether committing to the ground is worth the danger.

That adaptation problem sits surprisingly close to the logic behind the Stardew Valley Farmer Deviation. The goal is not to pretend the source character secretly came from a traditional fighting game. It is to identify what their original game asks the player to think about, then translate that behaviour into Smash without losing the identity that made the character interesting in the first place.

Fortunately, Plants vs. Zombies has already stress-tested almost every adaptation problem Smash would face.

Garden Warfare Already Did the Difficult Part

Garden Warfare asked what happens when a tower-defence unit is uprooted and allowed to run around a battlefield.

The answer was not simply a Peashooter with legs. PopCap turned him into an agile combatant while keeping the basic fantasy intact.

His Pea Cannon remained the foundation, but the surrounding abilities gave it shape. Chili Bean Bomb introduced a delayed explosive threat. Pea Gatling rooted him in place for sustained fire. Hyper, and later Pea Suped, gave him exaggerated speed, jumping and aerial mobility. Battle for Neighborville describes Peashooter as a versatile combatant built around Pea Cannon, Chili Bean Bomb, Pea Gatling and Pea Suped.

That transition unlocks the Smash concept.

The original Plants vs. Zombies supplies Peashooter’s strategic identity. He controls a lane, applies pressure from a distance and makes approaching him inconvenient. The shooter games add movement, commitment and risk. A character associated with standing still suddenly has reasons to leap across the battlefield, create delayed threats or deliberately plant himself somewhere dangerous.

It separates him from Piranha Plant more effectively than the character models ever could. Piranha Plant translates the physical absurdity of a Mario enemy into a brawler. Peashooter can translate the positional thinking of tower defence into a mobile zoning character. One celebrates what a bizarre creature can physically do. The other asks how much of the stage it can persuade you not to occupy.

Plants vs. Zombies also fills an interesting gap because Peashooter could represent both halves of the franchise rather than only its tower-defence origins. The original games give him lanes, specialised roles and the constant knowledge that one neglected route can turn a perfectly organised garden into an all-you-can-eat buffet. Garden Warfare and its successors give him an equally legitimate third-person shooter identity, complete with mobility, explosives and sustained ranged pressure.

Peashooter is perhaps the cleanest symbol for that combination, and he does not need to represent every plant personally. Turning him into Pokémon Trainer with a compost bin would miss the point. Sunflower, Chomper and Cactus could populate the background of a Plants vs. Zombies stage, while Crazy Dave and Dr. Zomboss provide the wider personality and spectacle. A few familiar faces might even find their way into his Final Smash, assuming the lawn war ever gets sufficiently out of hand.

His Nintendo history helps too. Plants vs. Zombies reached Nintendo DSiWare in Europe on 6 May 2011. Battle for Neighborville Complete Edition later arrived on Switch on 19 March 2021, followed by Replanted on Switch and Switch 2 in October 2025. Peashooter would still be an unmistakably third-party guest, but he would arrive with a Nintendo-platform history stretching back roughly fifteen years by the time this hypothetical pitch is being made, rather than being air-dropped into Smash because a licensing department had an unusually productive Tuesday.

More surprisingly, Peashooter may suit Smash better than several grander EA candidates.

The Sims represents more of the publisher’s history, but immediately creates the problem of adapting a completely customisable avatar into one definitive fighter. EA Sports presents an even stranger dilemma. Few parts of Electronic Arts are more important to the company, yet properly representing that history could mean putting an actual licensed athlete into Super Smash Bros. Suddenly Mario is not fighting a fictional footballer. He is drop-kicking a recognisable human being whose day job happens on television every weekend.

That is a different flavour of Deviation entirely, and the licensing conversation alone could probably qualify for extra time.

Mass Effect offers a far stronger conventional protagonist, but Peashooter has the cleaner Nintendo relationship and considerably fewer firearms that need explaining to Kirby.

Most importantly, his absurdity feels like Smash absurdity. This is a roster containing a fitness instructor, an NES accessory and Piranha Plant itself. Peashooter does not threaten that ecosystem. He looks like he has been growing in it for years.

That is a very different problem from the one facing SpongeBob SquarePants, whose Deviation has to argue with Smash’s video-game-only boundary before the moveset discussion can even begin. Peashooter is strange, but he is strange in exactly the right medium.

The moveset therefore has one job: make Peashooter feel like a lane-control specialist who can uproot, reposition and commit, rather than a projectile dispenser in a flowerpot. The original games supply the tactical grammar. Garden Warfare supplies the movement and risk.

Put those together, and the fighter should look something like this.