Boy meets girl. Man slays giants. Boy meets giant.
The Team ICO series is a trilogy of games featuring a Shared Universe and intuitive Action-Adventure gameplay design. It's not a series in the sense of the Halo or Resident Evil series, and is more of a universe that three stand-alone games take place in. The games focus on adventurers in barren worlds, working as a team — with one player controlling a hero and the companion controlled by the game, accomplishing things together that they could not do alone. There tends to be few usable objects, and the main character's inventory is highly limited. Most of the puzzles involve creative use of the nearby terrain in an intuitive way. Dialogue is sparse, and the story of each game may seem very minimal, but on later analysis opens itself up to many interpretations.
The three games are all connected by the appearance of horns on certain characters, which mark them as sharing the blood of a god.
- ICO (2001, PlayStation 2): A boy with horns is imprisoned in an ancient castle. There, he meets a girl who is also imprisoned there. The two attempt to escape from the castle.
- Shadow of the Colossus (2005, PlayStation 2): A young man goes on a journey with his trusty horse to revive a girl. He must slay a series of giants called Colossi to do so.
- The Last Guardian (2016, PlayStation 4): A boy goes on a journey with a (colossus-like) horned gryphon, and together they mature and become friends.
Although Team ICO itself would dissolve during the development of The Last Guardian, the team's head Fumito Ueda as well as several key staff members would go on to form a new studio called GenDesign, which would head the completion of The Last Guardian's development. A new game by them, in the spirit of the Team ICO trilogy, is in the works; Ueda voiced hopes for it to be officially unveiled in 2023
, although this did not come to pass.
This series provides examples of:
- A Boy and His X
- ICO — A boy and his princess.
- Shadow of the Colossus — A boy and his horse.
- The Last Guardian — A boy and his pet gigantic baby horned griffin colossus.
- Ambiguous Situation: With the stories told in such a minimalist fashion, very little is known about the locations these games take place in, the backstories of the main characters, and virtually nothing is known about the outside world.
- Anachronism Stew: The Castle in ICO and The Nest in The Last Guardian both contain Victorian-era technology such as railway lines, mine carts, and even elevators, technology that is quite a bit more advanced than what one would expect from such seemingly ancient ruins (especially in the case of The Last Guardian), and significantly more advanced than the medieval-esque civilisation that both main characters from those games originate from.
- Arc Symbol: Horns.
- Beautiful Void: The settings of each game are beautifully crafted but almost completely ruined and deserted.
- CastingAShadow/LightEmUp: All three games have multiple cases of light/darkness manipulation caused by different sources:
- In ICO, Yorda has strange light powers that activate special Magitek doors, the Queen manipulates both light and darkness, Ico and Yorda are harassed by shadow creatures, The magic sword Ico finds is perpetually crackling with strange lightning, and after the Queen's death, Yorda becomes a living shadow who rescues Ico.
- In Shadow of the Colossus, the Ancient Sword shoots a beam of light that tracks down colossi, freshly killed colossi have their body get consumed by darkness which seeps into Wander and the light shoots up into the shy as a pillar, and Dormin is seen as both a light from a great hole in the main room and a horned monster composed of darkness.
- In The Last Guardian, the boy finds a shield that casts a ray of light, Trico fires light from his tail, the armors are possessed by living shadows, and the Master of the Valley shoots strange light runes and covers itself in liquid darkness.
- Culture Chop Suey: The settings of each game tend to blend European and Mesoamerican architecture together, while having the protagonists come from more East Asian inspired cultures which serves to heighten the sense of alienation they feel. That's before we get into the rampant Schizo Tech seen in each game, which implies a level of technological disparity between the creators of places like the Castle in the Mist and the Nest and the more medieval cultures that the protagonists come from.
- Death of the Author: Invoked by series director Fumito Ueda. He's said that his interpretations are only his own, and encourages fans to come up with their own stories. The fandom has certainly run with that command - any given two fans will probably have at least mildly different interpretations on what exactly is going on in each game and how they're connected.
- Fictionary: The vaguely Japanese-esque fictional language spoken by the main characters across the three games, along with the unknown, vaguely Latin sounding tongue that Yorda speaks in ICO. The actual spoken dialogue of the first language is elegantly constructed gibberish, but Yorda's is a Conlang derived from Japanese by reversing the romanji.
- Horned Humanoid: Shows up in ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, with the protagonist of the latter being the first chronological example.
- Human Sacrifice: A weirdly common motif.
- Ico was placed into a sarcophagus to be sacrificed, like many other horned boys previously.
- Mono was sacrificed before the beginning of Shadow of the Colossus for "having a cursed fate".
- It is implied that the Tricos were delivering children to the Master of the Valley for some evil purpose.
- Kid Hero: ICO and The Last Guardian both have one. Wander can't be very old either.
- With the latter, that would all depend on one's definition of the word 'Hero'.
- Living Shadow: In ICO, they're your enemies, born from the souls of the sacrificed boys in the castle. In Shadow of the Colossus, they're spirits of each slain Colossus, but all they do is stare before you wake up. In The Last Guardian, the living armors are filled with shadowy essence in a vaguely humanoid form.
- Magitek: Another recurring trait:
- ICO has strange doors that open with Yorda's presence, satellite disk-like apparatuses that activate the main front door, and the strange magic sword at the bottom of the island.
- Shadow of the Colossus has Lord Emon mention "beings created from light", meaning that perhaps the Colossi are living magitek creatures. There's also the ancient sword that bends light.
- The Last Guardian has a mirror which reflects light, strange beacons that make Trico hostile, and living suits of armor. The Master of the Valley may be a living example.
- Mood Whiplash: ICO and Shadow of the Colossus were compiled for a PS3 release. Remaining on the disc selection on the PS3 home menu will play the first half of "You Were There", ICO's somber ending theme... followed by "Resurrected Power", one of the 'victory is at hand' themes from Shadow of the Colossus.
- Minimalism: The games are stripped down to their core gameplay elements, with few distractions and almost no sidequests. Shadow of the Colossus is notable because the player has the same two weapons for the whole game, excluding New Game Plus.
- Minimalist Cast: None of the games have more than a few main characters.
- Oddball in the Series: ICO and The Last Guardian are both Puzzle Games where you need to work with an AI companion in order to escape the location they find themselves trapped in. Shadow of the Colossus, by contrast, is a straight up Boss Game about finding and slaying giant beasts. Even applies in terms of gameplay, as of the games in the series, it's the one to have more classical video game conventions such as having an HP and grip bar.
- Once per Episode:
- All the games have at least one sequence that includes Ruins for Ruins' Sake.
- All the games have at least one major character that possesses horns.
- Pet Interface: Agro in Shadow of the Colossus and Trico in The Last Guardian.
- Riddle for the Ages: Rather than raising more questions than they answer about the setting, each new installment simply raises more questions without answering any of the existing ones to begin with.
- Scenery Porn: Orgies of it.
- Silence Is Golden: There's very little dialogue, allowing the visuals to tell the story of each game.
- Thematic Series: Team ICO is one of the few developers that invoke this trope deliberately, instead of as a way to get around loss of copyright. All three games share a common aesthetic, setting, and themes, as well as being placed in the action adventure genre, but are otherwise stand-alone titles. There are loose storyline connections (primarily that all three exist in a single universe), but they are almost completely inconsequential to the game experience.
- Theme Naming: Not the games themselves, but elements of each.
- ICO's main character is called Ico.
- Shadow of the Colossus started its development as NICO (from ni, two).
- The Last Guardian's beast is called Trico (from tri-, three).
- The Stinger: Each of the games within the series contain sometimes lengthy post-credits stringers which turn what were originally very Bittersweet Endings into slightly happier ones:
- In ICO, the game returns control to the player for a short Playable Epilogue, where after Yorda places Ico on a boat and stays in the castle as it collapses, both Yorda and Ico wash up on a faraway beach together.
- In Shadow of the Colossus, a resurrected Mono finds Wander again, now reincarnated as a baby with horns, linking the game with ICO. Although both are forever trapped within the seemingly lifeless and desolate Forbidden Lands, they walk to the top of the shrine to find a secret garden filled with animals.
- In The Last Guardian, the game reveals that the boy, who throughout the game was narrating the story as an adult, was speaking to a group of kids that after many decades stumbled upon the boy's magic mirror buried the ground, which was lost years ago when Trico brought the boy back to the village. At night, our protagonist and the group of kids activate the mirror using a torch, sending a signal that travels hundreds of miles back to The Nest, where Trico (now with a child) suddenly wakes up - suggesting that the two will meet again. Pressing the circle button during this sequence will light up Trico's horns, much like they would when holding the mirror throughout the game.
