Jerusalem-chan is legit.
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Under the pressing recommendation of @Pepe and @HeliosAlpha, I listened to Hoshi no Hito today. While I liked the ambiguity of Planetarian’s ending, some part of me did want to see if the Junker would make it.
Once again written by Suzumoto, we are put in the perspective of three children who find an old man buried in the snow. They soon discover that this man is a Stargazer, who is described as a man who shows people the stars. The Stargazer tells the eager and open-minded children about the stars, and the subject fascinates them much in the same manner as how it fascinated the more close-minded Junker. (Spoilers beyond) The children decide to follow in the Stargazer’s footsteps and become Stargazers themselves, but the judgement of the village, along with the Stargazer’s own demise, crushes their hopes. However, the village recognizes that their ‘goddess’, which turns out to be a trashed robot, has blessed the Stargazer, prompting the village to reverse their decision on letting the children become Stargazers.
One of the great things about this story is that the emotions are distributed quite evenly, knowing exactly how much and when sorrow and hope should be applied. The major reveal of the Stargazer being the Junker did not surprise me, but the scene involving his death was written so beautifully, I could not help but tear up.
I’ll end by saying that Hoshi no Hito is a wonderful listen for anyone who liked Planetarian, and want more out of the story. Thanks to Pepe and HeliosAlpha for recommending it to me! 
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I want to talk about Yumemi’s quote “Please do not divide Heaven in two…
that there be no separate Heavens for humans and robots”. Do you think
Yumemi’s prayer conflicts with most religious concepts of afterlife of a
Heaven and Hell?
Despite Yumemi’s religiously acceptive attitude towards various gods (she points out the Greek
pantheon) this belief is pitted against most afterlife beliefs.
the sequel side story when Junker passes away with the robot praying beside
him, he meets Yumemi at the planetarium with her wish to be able to cry
fulfilled, (this is debatebly a hallucination) assume that this is
her ideal Heaven where robots and humans have their afterlife.
Opinions on this religious concept and potential disagreements
that would arise with other beliefs and planetarian’s acceptiveness of other religions?
I haven’t read the prequel side stories but I understand planetarian can make plenty of Christian references but do you think planetarian aligns with a religion?
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You might wanna spoiler tag those side stories 
I think planetarian aligns with religion, but in a very human-centric way. A lot of religions tend to be “exclusive”, ergo, salvation is only promised to their followers (not to generalize, of course). Planetarian might somehow spin this concept on its head by making the excluded party not a human, but one with very human elements, and struggles to find that belonging. It’s a bit bittersweet in a way, but what I think it implies is that, despite our differences, Yumemi wishes for an afterlife where all humans, no matter the religion, no matter the biology (Robots are human too!), get along without having to worry about social restrictions. That does truly seem like a paradise.
It is also her own desire to keep helping out humans, as that is the main reason of her existence, whether on earth or in the afterlife.
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There’s also the point that many of us discussed above: Yumemi is more human than the actual humans of this forlorn wasteland of a world.
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So I was doing research for my essay about war and I found some really good stuff from planetarian so this is just a c/p of what I wrote for that paragraph.
“Planetarian” has many moments that may not be entirely satiric but are definitely against the idea of war. “Planetarian” is a visual novel that takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where the Earth has been completely ravished by war. It follows the Junker as he meets a sentient robot in a planetarium still preserved after 30 years of war. The robot, Hoshino Yumemi (translated as wish upon a star), is completely unaware of the destruction just outside the walls. The Junker occasionally ponders the start of the war: “…the biggest fools among them pressed the buttons that caused the orbital satellites to fire their germ-bomb warheads. Their intent was probably to lie and wait…and then to quickly seize control. However, not a single person came back.” This quote describes one of the reasons for war. But the war does not benefit anyone, as they themselves are killed in the process. “One year after the outbreak of the war, Earth’s population had been cut in half. That number was halved again by the second year… And again every following year…” This quote demonstrates the tremendous loss of life caused by just a few people in charge. He goes on to point out that the war had lost purpose and even when humans had died out, robots were created to keep the bloodshed going for no reason. After some time spent together, Yumemi teaches the Junker the hope of humanity, that one day people may reach the stars. Through this he realizes how ironic it is, for the war was started due to “global overpopulation and the failure of the Space Colonization Program.” I think this goes to show that war is not as necessary as it seems and may even cause the downfall of our civilization.
Sorry for wall of text but I think that because this is a discussion for planetarian as a whole I can discuss what this background info implies.
Sidenote: Holy crap discourse does not like c/p whole paragraphs at all. It gets all funky and i need to delete random spaces that appear…
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@cjlim2007 Yep, absolutely. planetarian is a cautionary tale which tells the of the damage war can cause. You’d probably do well to check out our planetarian bookclub, where we thoroughly explore this, as well as many other themes in planetarian!
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I was curious to play it since @Aspirety noticed this game that it’s on sale.(and that I don’t have any money so I missed the chance to play it.
)
So I finished Planetarian last night and while I’m late to the party, I thought I’d get my thoughts out.
One thing I’ve noticed in Key VNs is that the settings are often very carefully chosen to enhance the story and themes and in no other Key work that I’ve played/read/seen has the setting been so intertwined with the themes as Planetarian. I found the most tragic thing of all was when Yumemi, in all her blissful, ignorant optimism gives the token speech about her belief in humanity overcoming its differences when the chance of such a thing slipped by long, long ago and humanity has been living the consequences for the past 30 years. I think it’s been said before but her character is just the perfect, most tragic juxtaposition for the setting.
I also really like how it seemed to be established that the world was irrecoverable as opposed to most post-apocalyptic settings where there’s at least some semblance of hope. It makes the contrast between the world and Yumemi’s character all the more pronounced where the audience knows for certain that very little of her optimistic beliefs will ever, ever come true.
The whole game felt very airtight in terms of its themes and the story it wanted to tell and I’ve always been a fan of this kind of writing. Fewer characters, simpler stories and microcosmic settings all help to weave tighter narratives with complexity woven in layers rather than in breadth. I’d almost have preferred a little more ambiguity to the nature of the world to add to the mystery and to reinforce the idea that the planetarium was its own little paradise in a dying world.
Like I said in another topic I feel like Planetarian is one of my favourite Key works after Air, though I will have to reserve judgement until I actually read Key’s other VNs instead of just watching the anime. Speaking of which I would actually really like to see this adapted into a feature, I feel like the concept and length would suit it really well!
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Feature-length film do you mean? Because yes, I believe planetarian would be absolutely perfect as a feature-length film. The only other story I can imagine that can fit as well into a film would be Rewrite’s Terra Route
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Yeah exactly!
And I still need to get onto Rewrite but I’m really keen to play through Little Busters first.
For all of you who have not played Planetarian, there is a 50% Discount on it, if you buy it from Steam. Part of the Lunar New Years sale. Discount ends February 12th.
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Ayy, would definitely recommend grabbing Planetarian at this price if you haven’t read it yet.
Planetarian is actually my second favorite Key work. It’s succinct and sweet, with very little “wasted space”. I would argue that its intro is rather infodumpy and not well done (especially considering that most of the information that is infodumped to you is presented naturally in the story later), but pretty much everything after that comes perilously close to masterpiece tier in my mind. It feels well planned, and almost every detail is important, which is something that I can’t really say about any other Key works.
I really could fanboy about the ending to Planetarian all day. Let me just start by saying that Planetarian easily has the best ending of any Key work, and I don’t mean that just because of how damn depressing it is. The setting of Planetarian is one without any hope - there was never any chance of this story having a happy ending. The threads of the ending were woven brilliantly throughout the entire narrative. You just know this isn’t going to end well for the Junker - and the Junker damn well knows it too. This is made all the more brilliant by the sudden context given to Yumemi’s character by the ending. The fact that she knew the world was broken and tried to delude herself into thinking that she was broken instead makes all of her earlier silly optimistic dialogue become soul crushing. The ending is an absolute freight train of feels, but there’s no way you can say you didn’t see it coming from the beginning. It feels like a natural consequence of the setting - it’s not forced, and it’s perfectly believable. It absolutely wrenched my gut when Yumemi asks “Why did the world break?”, and it absolutely wrenched my gut again when the Junker lets go of his grenade launcher, deciding that he wouldn’t need it any more. Absolutely fucking brilliant.
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You don’t need tags in here as long as it’s not about the drama CDs.
Sums up Suzumoto’s writing pretty well in general. He likes either putting the plot on the table straight up or having pretty obvious foreshadowing. Like, this is gonna happen: you will be sad,and you will like it.[quote=“ThePlasticSpork, post:117, topic:1970”]
You just know this isn’t going to end well for the Junker
[/quote]
Comparatively it ends pretty well for him, but that’s more Hoshi no Hito territory.
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Okay, first of all, I would like to sincerely apologize for not reading this beautiful piece before, and also I would like to thank everyone for literally pushing me into reading it. If it werent fo you guys, I would just leave it in like 2017 and read other Key VN’s before planetarian.
This is going to be a huge emotional bomb that will represent my true honest feelings toward the VN itself and the characters, everything is my opinion so Im sure a lot of people might disagree.
I will be mostly focusing on the emotional impact, as well as on the characters and how it felt being with them at that time.
Ill be using a lot of spoilers since this post will be mostly oriented on that.
So the first Impression of Planetarian… to be completely honest was really confusing, all I got to know was the background story, some rainy sounds and some story about Planetarium.
At first I thought this is going to be trash, boring story that I just have to go and read because of sake of Kaza community, and Key… BUT it turned out that it was written in a style I actually like.
I was approximetely an hour into planetarian when I realised I was actually enjoying myself and the story was good.
The only thing that annoyed me throughout the whole story was the endless talking of Yumemi’s spoiler, her apologizing etc. but Ill get to that again since it connects to one of my main points.
Now… the emotions…
Where do I begin oh jesus.
As we all know the ending of the planetarian is not really a happy ending, that I wished for, but instead its one of the most painful things to see. For me seeing Yumemi being torn apart, yet still trying to talk was just…painful I could not read half of the text because I cried so much.
The emotional impact on me wasnt’t because of the scene itself, BUT because there is already some kind of connection/bond to the character, which I dont want to lose. And so the “Mr. Customer” did not want to lose for sure too…
Okay this is the part where It will seem like Im exaggerating, ya know me.
The moment when Yumemi got hit, right in that very moment, all of the things that they went together flashed before my very own eyes, goosebumps all over my body, saying “Please, no, just be alright dont do this to me…”
Everything that happened, every memory of her that I remembered made me even more sad. The worst thing for me was when we got to know what happened 30 years ago, leaving her in the planetarium. SHE WAS FUCKING ALONE THE WHOLE TIME. LIKE… to me this is just too sad. I just couldnt look at her face for a moment. Okay people might be saying, but shes a robot bla bla… No in the end she was fully concious that people would not return to her because of the War and thus hypothisized that shes broken.
Look I tend to put myself into other people’s shoes, and this is why it probably hit me even more, when I imagined how the “Mr Customer” must have felt. IN THIS FUCKING WORLD OF NOTHING, Mechs everywhere trying to fucking kill you, not almost a single human being alive, you find her. Like okay, this might be not true, but I deeply believe, that the Mr Customer was fucking happy that she could have met her and hold onto these silly conversations. IN THIS WORLD OF NOTHING, YOU CAN ACTUALLY SPEND SOME TIME TALKING TO SOMEONE. And then- you lose even that. (if it was me I would be emotinally torn apart and couldnt move). DONT TELL ME THIS IS NOT SAD. I just could not stand the fact Key did this. The emotions were overwhelming me at this point. I had to take a little break.
But guess what, there is even my inner connection to Yumemi.
As much as I didnt want to admit it, Yumemi was a bit annoying… but… okay ill say it. One of the reasons why it was so annoying to me, was because she reminded me of my past self. I was literally like Yumemi… I know I know “but you cant be like a robot” bla bla, but my behaviour was so similiar to her that I found a sister in her. This was my own feelings being implemented into her, and everytime she said “what does that mean” or just simply began to talk happily over things, I could not stop but remind me of my past, little weak self… That’s why I was really, really, really sad when she got striked down. I think it was my first time I could relate to a fictional character this much (I know this might not make sense to you guys, but to me it was real emotions, im being completely honest.)
And I guess that is everything I wanted to share with you guys. Im happy I could read this VN, even though I spent 3 hours of crying.
Sorry for the long post, I hope I dont get much hate for sharing my honest feelings.
Planetarian: 9/10
Peace
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I think one consensus that most people have read on planetarian is that Yumemi, despite actually being a robot, has more human qualities than the junker himself. If anything, the junker seems more robotic, going through a routine, mundane process, just for the sake of survival. And I think it’s important to see that his interaction with Yumemi actually made him more human.
That aside, I’m really glad you read it Ika, and I hope everyone else can appreciate this work as much as you (and everyone else around here) did
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Thats exactly what I meant, Im glad that you understood it :3.
Not going to lie, reading this post really made me want to reread Planetarian all over again. Glad you loved it buddy. 
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Ika, no one is going to harass you over relating to a fictional character - robot or not. That would just be hypocrisy on a whole new level. You’re supposed to love Yumemi because, it’s like Pepe said, she’s more human the the Junker; there’s even a music track called Perfectly Human.
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or is it Perfect Human? either way it works
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