History Main / ItsAllUpstairsFromHere

* In the ''Videogame/{{Yakuza}}'' series, the climax of the games often involve fighting your way up a massive building (typically the Millennium Tower) for a confrontation with the antagonists in either [[ExecutiveSuiteFight the upper floors of the building]] or [[RooftopConfrontation on top of the building itself]].

-->'''Coach:''' Who the hell... puts an evac station...up 30 flights of goddamn stairs?

* ''WesternAnimation/KungFuPanda'' makes a RunningGag of Po being too overweight to climb the stairs to the Jade Palace without getting winded. Even after all his training, the only improvement he gets in stair climbing is that he gets ''less'' winded, and is at least able to stand up after getting to the top. The gag is extended in the sequel, where he regards the stairs to Lord Shen's throne room as "my old enemy". In this case, he has to get carried half of the way up.

* The Sunspire in ''VideoGame/{{Unreal|I}}'' is a rock spire with the inside carved into a building, and so tall you can clearly see it on the skyboxes of other levels. The entrance is a good 300m above the lava lake it sits in, you navigate eight or so floors of "regular" size, then get a 10-second ride on a lift that is ''so fast'' its engine sound is subject to the Doppler effect, then there are two more floors before you reach the tippy top. You get a good sense of scale when you get there, when you look down and the bridge to enter the building and can measure it in ''milimeters'' on the screen. Unusually for the trope, it's an area visited around mid-game, nowhere near the ending - and its purpose is to get you [[FloatingContinent even higher up]] via the SpaceElevator that you can call at the top.

** ''VideoGame/ShinMegamiTenseiIIINocturne'' had a few, including one incredibly tall tower you had to clear once, which was then crushed by an ''even bigger tower.'' Thankfully, it skipped a lot of floors going up, so although the game said you were on floor 600, you didn't trek up those many floors.

** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXII'' had the ''100-story'' Pharos. You skip maybe 27 stories by teleporting, but the rest have to be climbed. It also has three basement floors, solely for OptionalBoss sidequests. However, it should be noted that the definition of "story" is stretched to its limit. Most of those stories are better defined as "landings between sets of stairs".

** ''VideoGame/DragonQuestIV'' has a tower leading to the floating castle of Zenethia. (The fifth game still has the tower but the castle fell into the lake.)

** ''VideoGame/DonkeyKong94'' for the UsefulNotes/GameBoy has the Tower as the ninth and final world.

** The almost unbearably long Comms Tower stairs, on which Snake must fight a running gun battle against an infinite supply of {{Mook}}s, in the first ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid'' (and in the MSX game ''VideoGame/MetalGear2'', for that matter.) Fortunately, the ''other'' Comms Tower has a (mostly) functional elevator.

* ''WesternAnimation/KungFuPanda'' makes a RunningGag of Po being too overweight to climb the stairs to the Jade Palace without getting winded. Even after all his training, the only improvement he gets in stair climbing is that he gets ''less'' winded, and is at least able to stand up after getting to the top. The gag is extended in the sequel, where he regarnds the stairs to Lord Shen's throne room as "my old enemy". In this case, he has to get carried half of the way up.