I wonder if anybody can resolve a discussion I've been having elsewhere:
 
Would you say that the Team ICO games (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian) are a series?  Do they all happen in the same narrative world?  Do characters span the games?  Will colossi exist in The Last Guardian?   Are they just three games that happen to be made by the same small studio?
 
Please comment your opinion - I didn't play Ico or SotC myself, but heard good things about them.

I wonder if anybody can resolve a discussion I've been having elsewhere:
 
Would you say that the Team ICO games (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian) are a series?  Do they all happen in the same narrative world?  Do characters span the games?  Will colossi exist in The Last Guardian?   Are they just three games that happen to be made by the same small studio?
 
Please comment your opinion - I didn't play Ico or SotC myself, but heard good things about them.

Shadow of the Colossus is a prequel to Ico, but as far as The Last Guardian is concerned, I don't think anything's been confirmed.

Well, the games don't really have anything to do with each other story wise and like you mention, the same characters does not appear in more than one game as far as we know with The Last Guardian of course. But you could definitely say their in the same franchise. The thing which is very significant about Team ICO is the way they handle shading. You can definitely see similarities in the visual style between SotC and ICO, and from what we've seen of The Last Guardian it also seem to be carrying over the same kind of shading. Also, the world these stories takes place in are pretty similar as well, so that is also something to keep in mind. You could kinda say Shadow of the Colossus is the spiritual sequel of ICO. 
 
I'm pro calling it a franchise.

Thanks for your input.
 
The discussion this is in regard to is about whether or not a tweet that refered to the August Game Informer cover, which will be  "a giant sequel, not at E3, with art that will make fantasy fans crap themselves" was about TES 5, DA2, or The Last Guardian.  In this context, I don't the TLG really fits as a 'sequel'.

SotC is a prequel to ICO, which i remember the ending of SOTC was the beginning of the horned people race, and in ICO the main character was a horned boy.   Don't know if Last Guardian is in the same game world, though it would be interesting if it was kind of like a backwards trilogy where last guardian predates SotC.

SotC is absolutely a prequel to ICO. I think the assumption that The Last Guardian is canonically placed in the same universe is a fair one.

Also there's a beach in Shadow of the Collosus that is very identical to that of the beach that you wash up on at the end of ICO

Wired News: Is there any connection between the worlds of and ?

Fumito Ueda: There's no specific connection as far as a timeline. But, both games exist in the same world.

WN: But you've said the baby we see at the end of is the first "baby born with horns" referred to in the backstory of .

FU: Yes. I wanted to give some idea to the player, after you complete the game, that there was a connection to . That's why I put in the baby with the horns. If somebody goes all the way through the game, I wanted them to be rewarded.

Read More http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/03/70286#ixzz0ul3xxpZn
 

Dude just thinking about this topic gets me jazzed. it's such a big world in SotC and you could find an amazing discovery under any rock. search around on YouTube and you'll find some amazing discoveries. That said it has been found that the world of SotC is, at the very least, based off of the world of Ico. And the horned boy story thread convinces many to believe that the games are in fact canonically connected. Among the fanbase it is believed that SotC will have the greatest landmass of all the games including TLG, as most think it will be a sequel to ICO and will feature the further receding landmass that is the SotC Forbidden Land.