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Tower Power

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.

List items

1. Pandora's Tower

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.
2. Arcomage

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...
3. Tower Toppler

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.
4. The Tower of Druaga

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.
5. Tales of Symphonia

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...
6. Parasite Eve

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.
7. Die Hard Trilogy

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.
8. Tokyo Tower

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.
9. Combine Citadel

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.
10. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars

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.
11. Tower of Babel

The Biblical Tower of Babel, King Nimrod's affront to God that He Himself personally tore down for being too ostentatious, has been referenced more than a couple times in the annals of video game history. Notably, it's the final location of the thematically bizarre Illusion of Gaia, a giant robot in Final Fantasy IV, housed demons and Cyberdemons both and has been the focus of at least one XBLA/iOS game where you're directly preventing its construction.
12. Tartarus

The creepy makeshift dungeon that forms itself every evening during the Midnight Hour in Atlus's excellent Persona 3. It's forged from apparently half the buildings in the island city of Iwatodai and changes its layout every time you enter it. As Tartarus is the name of the mythological underworld in which Sisyphus is tortured with his boulder-rolling, it seems like an entirely fitting name for 200+ floors of randomized terror.
13. Ys: The Vanished Omens

I didn't want to feature too many JRPG towers unless there was something of note about them, but in Ys' case that notable thing is that the entire Tower of Darm dungeon makes up more than half the game. It's nothing small, that's for sure. Ys 2 actually continues the tower climb, which is why both games are so often merged together whenever they're rereleased or remade.
14. Final Fantasy

OK, just to get all this JRPG business out the way, here's some notable towers in the Final Fantasy series: FF3's Crystal Tower (hard to reach, thanks to a giant maze around it), FF4's Tower of Babil (actually a robot, as stated previously), FF6's Tower of Kefka (both his dungeon and he himself in his boss fight are immensely tall towers. It's almost as if he's compensating for something), FF7's Shinra Building (another one of those skyscraper variants), FF8's Lunatic Pandora (that one floats and goes to space, so that's a thing, I guess?), FF12's Pharos Lighthouse (a massive example that has at least seven boss fights and an equally immense basement) and FFMQ's Focus Tower (center of the known world and final dungeon both). Phew, glad I got all that out of my system.
15. The Sixteenth Colossus

Though the hub base is a tower of sorts, the sixteenth Colossus is perhaps the more striking example that Shadow of the Colossus has to offer. Half the battle is simply approaching the thing as it mortars the heck out of Wander before he can get close. It's a long, slow battle of attrition against an enormous (but mercifully immobile) foe.
16. Radio Tower

One of Far Cry 3's many small but significant strengths was making the climb up these everyday metal structures an exercise in vertiginous suspense. Rich kid Jason Brody, between foiling roving packs of pirates and making fashion accessories out of endangered wildlife, is tasked with disabling whatever devices are blocking the signals from local radio towers across the Rook Islands. This means a slow, careful ascension up a bunch of these precarious iron monoliths that haven't seen any maintenance since WW2.
17. Fable II

I wasn't that impressed with Fable 2. I'll begrudge it one of its better touches, though: That of the Tattered Spire, a foreboding tower far off in the distance that seems to gain a few hundred yards in height after every one of the series' infamous time skips. Eventually, you're captured and forced to work on its construction yourself for what seems to be more than a few painful years. I really don't like Fable much.
18. Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

One very notable location in the nonpareil Assassin's Creed game is that of Castel Sant'Angelo, the home of the Pope and his dysfunctional relatives and one of the tallest and most elaborate structures to climb to its very peak. Once there you have a shot at an achievement; just make sure you aren't closely following the directions of a particularly spiteful best friend: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zJDKZ_04MU#t=6m30s
19. Psychonauts

Psychonauts has a tower that initially seems like the final dungeon, and one that definitely is. The upper reaches of the Insane Asylum, home to the insane Dr Loboto, is made all the more creepy by its considerable level of disrepair, allowing you to see into the night sky and the ground far below. The true horror comes later with the Meat Circus, a final climb up a big top tent of flames and traps that has caused many hardships to countless gamers. Plus they get kind of squicked out by all the meat hanging everywhere. It is pretty gross.
20. Clock Tower

You can take your pick here. Either the eponymous Clock Tower of the game with the same name, or the customary Castlevania fixture infested with rotating gears, spikes and those thrice-accursed floating medusa heads. I'd even go so far as to include the real-life clock tower of some repute that is Elizabeth Tower (home of Big Ben, which is the bell and not the clock in case you weren't aware) if I could think of any games that featured it. That optional boss fight in Kingdom Hearts?
21. Ghostbusters

The Ghostbusters NES game had a loooot of problems. Not least of which is the final-but-one sequence where the Ghostbusters recreate their long climb through 55 Central Park West, Dana's apartment building that's pejoratively referred to as Spook Central. The sequence is just one horrible, unplayable stage in a long series of them, as Venkman et al take their sweet time getting anywhere as ghosts continue to pummel their indolent asses in the interim.
22. Shadow Hearts: Covenant

Ending the list with a showstopper, Shadow Hearts: Covenant's surreal sense of humor has an unfortunate tendency towards the Gay Panic sub-genre of comedy, with one notable instance involving a massive tower of wrasslin' rings as an optional dungeon for Joachim the body-building, bench-pressing, tuna-wielding vampire. Defeating a series of challengers, Joachim leaps onto each ascending ring to finally reach the top and face his mentor, the Great Question. What follows is perhaps best left for the player to discover themselves (but it's implied to involve butt stuff).