The Nightmare of Druaga - a joint effort between Chunsoft, Matrix Software & Arika and part of the Mystery Dungeon series, is also a sequel (20 years later) to Namco's highly influential The Tower of Druaga. However - its mazes actually kept the hand-crafted, cramped designs and find-the-key objectives of the first, albeit drowned in MD mechanics (hub town, roguelike setbacks, elevation, item retention) as well as brand new ones (weapon/armor enhancement, synthesis, offerings) which even include adaptions from classic Druaga (destructible walls, will o wisps, time limits). Two similar 'revisions' also form the best of this feature jumble: Their equipment-based skill system, a set of special abilities capable of transferring to other gear, and bonus dungeons: high risk, high reward floors that forgo EXP in favor of better loot (reminiscent of Dark Cloud's extra areas).

Losing its randomly generated floors - though, left gameplay with a void in variety that its level design and puzzles couldn't quite fill. But apart from the very basics, and despite its notorious difficulty, this works as a summary of all the ideas they've tried so far with the Mystery Dungeon games.