Dharma Dojo (Game)

Dharma Dojo

GAME » on April 1994

Arcade (Platform)Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Platform)

A tile-matching puzzle game based on a Japanese children's game called Daruma Otoshi.

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Overview

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Dharma, also known as Daruma Dojo, is a tile-matching puzzle game developed and released by Metro for arcades on April 1994. It later received a home conversion for the Super Famicom, published by ITC, Inc. on February 10, 1995.

Themed after the Japanese children's game Daruma Otoshi (Object) and featuring various Japanese folklore, Dharma tasks players with re-arranging a playfield of blocks by moving up-and-down it and using their mallet to knock the leftmost block down to a new bottom row. The objective is to knock all blocks of the same type to the bottom row, which clears those blocks from the board.

Gameplay

The game board is comprised of various stacks of colored blocks. The player character (a warrior monk for Player 1 and shrine maiden for Player 2) can rise and drop via a magic cloud, allowing them to sit parallel with any stack. By hitting a block stack, the one furthest from the player - to the far left - falls through a gutter that runs down the left side. The other blocks fill the gaps left behind, each moving one space to the left.

Each stage has a certain amount of blocks that can be knocked in the gutter at a time, from three blocks at Stage 1, to four blocks in versus multiplayer, to eight blocks in Stages 14-16. If all of the blocks of the same type are knocked through, they vanish off the grid. A group of mismatched blocks will appear as the new bottom row, pushing everything above it up one block, though this is sometimes necessary to line up the next matching group. If a row tops the 12-row board, the player loses.

In single-player, players race against the clock (represented by an enemy rising towards the top of the screen) to clear stages of entire boards, with block clears halting the clock temporarily. In multiplayer, both players fight to survive the longest, with each four block clears sending groups of blocks to the opponent's board.

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