by mento
Pretty much the oldest cliché in the Big Book of Being a Bad Guy is to build your immense, trap-filled lair forever downwards, letting adventurers get deeper and deeper under the Earth's crust as they contemplate how great an idea following this dark pit into Hell was. Slightly less common is the opposite scenario: An immense tower that stretches into the sky and tests your resolve in other ways. Chiefly, it tests just how athletic you are and how comfortable your footwear really is after fifty flights of stairs, and how impressively vertiginous the vistas will be at the top where there's probably going to be a boss fight with a dragon or some giant asshole bird to obstruct the view.
The below is a rather tall (it seemed germane) list of towers in video games. Rather than check JRPGs-R-Us for every single instance of a tower dungeon, I've just given you something of a sampler of the interesting variations you're likely to find.
But then, this list is no match for my Glower Power. Oh, there's still a moratorium on Simpsons references? Tch, you're all impossible.
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Pandora's Tower is simply a series of tower dungeons one after the other. Twelve in all. It's an exercise in simplicity, as there's no Zelda like overworld to concern oneself with. Just enter each dungeon, remove the chains that block the door to the boss, somehow reach the top where that boss awaits and then murder the gigantic thing. Not a single part of that sequence of events is quite as easy as it sounds.
Arcomage began life as a mini-game in the quintessential CRPG Might and Magic VII. It made its way into the sequel due to overwhelmingly positive fan feedback and eventually became its own standalone thing. It's a relatively simple resource-based card game in which you have to maintain your tower while destroying your opponent's. It's actually quite addicting, however, and there was more than a few times where I forgot that there was this whole "saving the world" task I was meant to be doing...
I.e. Nebulus. I would also accept "Castelian". I probably would not accept Tower Toppler, if I could help it. Ultimately, though, this old-school rotational platformer where you make your way up a series of towers avoiding all enemies and traps along the way by any other name would be just as devious.
Though if you want to get really old-school, Namco's proto-RPG is a bona fide classic of the genre and is thought to be the chief inspiration for the Legend of Zelda, as well as countless other games. If you have enough skill and luck, you can ascend to the top floor, but it behooves you to discover some of the Tower's secret treasures to make the trip up far easier on yourself. You can either find this game as is on one of Namco's various Arcade collections, or just play its similarly-built homage dungeon in Tales of Destiny, which is an excellent game in its own right.
Talking of Tales: As a venerable JRPG series, it's as fond of the Tower Dungeon trope as any other. The central tower in Symphonia, though, has some major plot significance however: As the "gate between worlds", the Tower has been the center of much of the world's religious dogma and the final destination of the hapless "Chosen One" Colette. It's also so tall that it's kind of hard to miss wherever you might be standing in the world of Sylvarant (or, indeed, Tethe'alla, the alternate world). Of course, this being a JRPG, nothing is quite as it seems...
Not so much a tower as a skyscraper, the massive optional dungeon that is New York's Chrysler Building is a modern (and real-life) example of a gigantic tower dungeon. It is not for the faint of heart, but then most of Parasite Eve's gross body horror shenanigans aren't.
I was debating whether to follow up the Chrysler Building with the Nakatomi Plaza of Die Hard Trilogy, or that of the Die Hard Arcade game. As purists know, though, Die Hard Arcade is actually the unrelated Sega action game Dynamite Deka with a yippee ki-yay facelift. The first of the Die Hard trilogy (and the only one to feature Nakatomi Plaza) has the player, as John McClane, ascend the building one mercenary-filled floor at a time.
Rounding off the trio of towers that are actually real, Tokyo Tower is something of a visually striking landmark in the city for which its named and thus tends to appear as a shorthand acknowledgement that, yes, were are now in Tokyo. Fragile Dreams' final boss fight takes place on the top of the tower, and it's also the final resting place of Caim and Angelus in cavia's very strange Drakengard.
This enormous and ominous structure takes up much of the skyline when the taciturn Gordon Freeman takes his first few steps into the exterior of City 17. Being of Combine origin, it's disquietingly alien and - naturally enough - the setting for the final stretch of the game.
Booster's Tower isn't perhaps remarkable for its tower-like level design, but rather the sheer oddity of the place. The player's seen a few instances of the game's out-there sense of humor by the time they reach this pointy eyesore, but Booster's tower is also stacked with strange enemies, an even stranger owner, one room where you can transform Mario into an 8-bit version of himself and some of the smoothest music tracks the game has to offer.
