Pokemon of the Week #26: Tsareena

#763: Tsareena, the Fruit Pokemon

Sometime this month there's going to be a Nintendo Direct thing, and I knew I wanted to do an Alola-region Pokemon of the Week. And, yeah, we had Arceus earlier this week, but I dunno. I just kinda wanted to write up more Pokemon of the Week articles in preparation for September where I won't be around much, so if there's a bit of a misnomer and we get multiple Pokemon of the Week articles in, um, a week, well, whoops.

Anyway, I rolled Tsareena for the planned 'Alola Week', and I'm... not the biggest fan of Tsareena. I've never been a big fan of Pokemon that are straight-up based on humans. Like, goths, wrestlers, mimes, construction workers, karate masters? While there are some that tread the line well (Alakazam), and some that don't (Jynx), anything that is based on a human profession tend to get an eye of sccrunity from me. Add that to the fact that Tsareena is yet another 'girly plant', following the heels of multiple examples from the past -- Bellossom, Liligant, Cherrim, Roserade, Maractus... I wasn't particularly impressed, especially since the latest among them, Liligant, was a particularly disappointing and wholly boring design.

At least Tsareena looks hella more interesting than Liligant, though -- one of the biggest weakness of Liligant as a design is that she just looks like a generic plant fairy thing, unlike the obviously cactus-inspired Maractus or the rose-inspired Roserade (who even gets a masquerade mask to look even cooler). Tsareena, while at first glance I dismissed as yet another plant girl, is clearly based on a mangosteen, a fruit known as the 'Queen of the Fruits', which explains Tsareena's regal look. There is also legend that Queen Victoria of England once offering a reward to anyone who could bring a fresh sample of mangosteen to her. 

Specifically, whereas her pre-evolutions Bounsweet and Steenee are based on the mangosteen's exterior, Tsareena's skirt and head is based on a mangosteen's interior, a cool little visual design that I missed the first time I dismissed Tsareena away. And, of course, the more humanoid aspects of Tsareena is based on a queen. Or, as her name implies, a tsarina, which is the name of a tsar's wife -- a tsar being the term for a ruler of Russia in the 1900's. The design kind of stops there, though, since Tsareena doesn't actually have much in common with actual tsarinas, beyond the generic 'lady-in-a-dress'.

Perhaps one of the biggest dislikes I have about Tsareena's design is how... weird she was proportioned. Not all humanoid Pokemon have to look 100% like how humans are proportioned, but Tsareena had a huge head, gigantic stabby legs, a gigantic poofy skirt... and then everything from the neck to the wait is tiny and looks like stubs. It's weird. And some people have even compared Tsareena to having dominatrix vibes due to how her 'stockings' look. I don't quite see it from a design standpoint, but her dex entries do tell about how she delights in defeating enemies and gets some sadistic glee from doing so, and evolving a Steenee to Tsareena requires that she know Stomp. We'll... not talk about that too much because I don't really personally see it.

I do think that the design of Tsareena, visuals aside, is actually pretty well-done. The evolution from the very adorable Bounsweet to Steenee to Tsareena is neat and gradual and makes sense. The line is all-female, to reflect the whole 'queen of the fruits' thing. She gets a cool little specific ability, Queenly Majesty, that disables all priority moves. And stats-wise, Tsareena is a mighty physical attacker that also has a high special defense, and the game gives her an exclusive move known as Trop Kick, which, in addition to being an unabashedly glorious pun, is a pretty powerful 70-attack STAB physical attack that debuffs the enemy's attack stat.

One thing that I really felt that Nintendo dropped the ball on was in her typing. A huge emphasis is put on Tsareena's kicking powers both in her design, her 3D model animations, her moveset and her pokedex entries. She gets, in addition to her exclusive move Trop Kick and her essential-to-evolve-move Stomp, the powerful Fighting move High Jump Kick. I honestly thought when seeing her description as a fighting queen that fights with kicks that she would be a Grass/Fighting type, or a Grass/Fairy. Hell, or at least have something similar to Hawlucha's Flying Press, a dual-type move if they didn't want to do Breloom redux. But no, Tsareena's a boring pure-Grass type. I dunno. It just seems boring considering the sheer amount of pure-Grass types we already have.

Oh well. While I truly didn't think much of Tsareena when she was first announced during the leadup to Generation VII, I did love Bounsweet when I first saw her in the game. Such an adorable little fruit baby! And Tsareena, truth be told, ended up being pretty okay. I never used her -- it's pretty easy to get Bounsweet considering one of the earliest in-game trades wants to trade a very common Lilipup for a Bounsweet, but I started off with a Rowlet so I didn't need a pure-Grass type.

I suppose I haven't really spoken about Tsareena's dex entries. The dex entries emphasizes the strength of her legs, and if she wins she'll kick the defeated and laugh at it. But the dex entries since the fourth generation have been truncated and bland, honestly, and the original release post in Pokemon.com delivers a longer entry on Tsareena. Tsareenas are all high-class Pokemon, and will punish anyone that's evil, even if that person is her trainer. She'll actually tell trainers that are incompetent to piss off -- or, well, so they say. She can't actually do that in-game, but that's a cool little character bit to this regal Pokemon. And apparently touching her 'crown' is her weakness? Huh. Oh, and also Tsareena is very protective of the little pre-evolutions. Wouldn't you? They're adorable. And Bounsweets looks so tasty, they need someone to protect them.

I don't think Tsareena's super-useful in the cmopetitive battlefield, though lord knows I've not touched that scene since the sixth generation. Smogon tells me that she's in the UU tier, which probably means she's not that good, which isn't a big surprise. She's definitely fine as a member of your in-game party, though honestly if we're picking a Grass-type from Alola I really would go with the far cooler-looking Lurantis. That's just me, though.

Overall, I'm not Tsareena's biggest fan, but writing this article has clearly made me appreciate this queen of the fruits a little more than I did before.