Emeraldia

Overview

Emeraldia is a falling-block tile-matching puzzle game developed and released by Namco for arcades on July 1993.

Featuring a cutesy aquatic theme and similar in playstyle to Columns, Emeraldia has players manipulating trominoes (arranged in a "L" shape) of different-colored cubes from the top of the playfield, as they try to break groups of cubes (linked horizontally, vertically, and diagonally) by landing cubes of the same color on top of them. To complicate matters, cubes must be broken twice before they are cleared out of the playfield.

Along with an endless "Normal Mode" and a two-player "Head-to Head Play Mode", the game includes a story "Adventure Mode", where players travel through the world's oceans as Mint the Dolphin to rescue his sea creature friends of the paradise Emeraldia from Jamir, the Devil of the Dark Sea. This mode is unique as players must complete stages of pre-determined layouts by having all friends land on the bottom of the playfield. It also makes use of limited-use power-ups found throughout the game.

The game was later digitally re-released for the Wii (as a Virtual Console title) exclusively in Japan on March 26, 2009 and for both the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch (as part of HAMSTER's Arcade Archives series) worldwide on April 17, 2024.