Onet PaoPao Classic is a reimagined version of Onet and Mahjong connect-style tile-matching games. On each level, the player's main goal is to reveal a stunning monster painting hidden behind tiles on the playfield. They complete this task by following classic connect rules. They must work quickly before a rainbow-colored horizontal timer bar above the tiles disappears from the screen. They also attempt to earn the highest possible score.
The tiles display monsters similar to popular battle-arena trainer games like Digimon and Pok�mon. The player must match pairs of these monsters to remove the tiles. They can only remove tiles in specific positions, such as side-by-side, stacked and same-edged tiles. Although they can also remove pairs across gaps, they can't select tiles that connect via more than connecting lines that appear during the selection process.
Onet PaoPao Classic offers the player two main tools to help them find and remove monster pairs more quickly. It offers them a question mark button to highlight a pair and a red heart icon to shuffle the remaining tiles. With the heart tool, the game places some tiles into more optimal adjacent positions. As a result, the player is able to more quickly see pairings and select and remove matching tiles.
