Controlling the golden-armored knight Gilgamesh, the player is tasked with scaling 60 floors of the titular tower in an effort to rescue the maiden Ki from Druaga, a demon with eight arms and four legs, who plans to use an artifact known as the Blue Crystal Rod to enslave all of mankind.

It was conceived as a "fantasy Pac-Man" with combat and puzzle solving, taking inspiration from games such as Wizardry and Dungeons & Dragons, along with Mesopotamian, Sumerian and Babylonian mythology.

However, the 2009 Wii Virtual Console release in North America was met with a largely negative reception for its obtuse design, which many said was near-impossible to finish without a guidebook, alongside its high difficulty and controls.

Controlling the knight Gilgamesh, the player must scale all 60 floors of the tower to rescue the maiden Ki from Druaga, an eight-armed and four-legged demon who plans to use an artifact called the Blue Crystal Rod to enslave mankind.

[1] Each floor contains enemies that Gilgamesh may need to defeat to progress, such as slimes, knights, projectile-firing wizards, ghosts that can travel through walls and fire-spewing dragons.

[1] These items include a pickaxe that can destroy walls, boots that will drastically increase Gilgamesh's walking speed, and a candle that can reveal ghosts.

[3] After releasing Xevious a year later, an overwhelming success in Japan, Endō took a business trip to North America, where he bought a copy of Dungeons & Dragons.

[5] The game was made to run on the same hardware setup used in Mappy, which featured horizontal-scrolling and had a vertical screen layout,[4] while the 60 floors were inspired by the Sunshine 60, the tallest building in Asia at the time.

The promotional arcade flyer used miniature dioramas with cardboard cutouts instead of drawings, a response to Namco president Masaya Nakamura's hatred towards manga.

[5] The last frame in the poster has Gilgamesh wearing the horned helmet fighting Druaga, meant to imply that players would need it in order to finish the game.

Upon release in Japan, The Tower of Druaga was an overwhelming critical and commercial success, attracting millions of fans with its use of puzzle-solving and action-oriented gameplay.

[4] The Wii Virtual Console release in 2009 was met with a largely negative reception in North America, many criticizing the game's controls, high difficulty and design.

Reviewing the Wii Virtual Console port, Dan Whitehead of Eurogamer referred to the game's design as "diabolically obtuse" and criticized Gilgamesh's slow movement, notably with deflecting projectiles.

[21] Lucas M. Thomas of IGN was the most critical of the game, lambasting its "arbitrary, off the wall" item requirements, slow pace and high difficulty, calling it "woefully boring and pointless" to play.

[7] Taking place right after the events of the original, two players controlled Gilgamesh and Ki as they made their way to the bottom of Druaga's tower with the Blue Crystal Rod.

[32] In 2004, Namco partnered with Arika to develop The Nightmare of Druaga: Fushigi no Dungeon for the PlayStation 2, one of the few Babylonian Castle Saga games to be localized outside Japan.

[33] Part of the Mystery Dungeon series, the game is notorious for its extreme difficulty, where death would revoke all of the player's items and half of their money.

[45][46] An anime series, The Tower of Druaga: The Aegis of Uruk, was produced by Japanese studio Gonzo and premiering on April 4, 2008,[47] taking place roughly 80 years after the events of the original game.