Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles is - as already indicated by its name - a puzzle game, similar to games like Puzzle Quest or the Bejeweled series. Your goal is to adjust blocks of different colors using a "cursor" comprehending of four blocks so that they form a diamond pattern. If this case occurs, all blocks of the same color touching the diamond will disappear. The blocks above the empty space will now drop and the empty space at the top is filled with new blocks. The game has a strong focus on combos, among others full combos (cleaning all blocks of one color in one move), elementals (bursting at least two different colors in one move), chains (when the dropping blocks form another diamond) or time combos (finishing another combo within a time frame). An outstanding feature of the game is the story mode, where you travel over a world map similar to Super Mario World. Behind each waypoint you will usually find a puzzle, but you may also discover a minigame or other special locations (like shops). The stages are connected with a funny and self-ironic storyline, among others containing the developers of the game as the protagonists. Apart from the story mode the game also features an arcade and an puzzle mode, the first one enabling you to play alone, against a friend or the CPU, the later offering preset playfields, which have to be cleared within a limited number of moves. For the Dreamcast version of the game it was possible to pre-order a custom sprite character which can be unlocked in the game.