I actually just finished it today! It was a sweet story and I really enjoyed it.
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Or be like me and read it while chilling at Biz’s granny’s place for the weekend. 
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I wrote a thing about Planetarian and stuff. You’re welcome.
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Thanks for sharing that with us! Very nice writeup.
To be honest, I don’t really know where to post this, so I thought Planetaria - General Discussion might be a good place to leave it, but feel free to move it if you think it doesn’t belong here.
Warning, long post
Once I finish a VN and find myself having to write something in the forum, I end up many times doing critics in a far colder way that I want. I’d like to share how much I loved a VN, how it was an important experience for me, how it wasn’t just another book, another series or another movie. I want to demonstrate how it was something more.
However, plainly saying that you loved a VN, that it was the best thing in your life or that it changed the way you thought about something, is something that I think that doesn’t represent my real thoughts. Because in my mind, I think that what my experience is far more than one or two paragraphs. That’s partly why I don’t like the fact that The K.E.Y. written entries have to be one or two paragraphs at most (don’t worry @Aspirety there’s nothing wrong with that, I’ll end up submitting an entry anyway).
Anyway, to fulfill my wish of sharing how much I loved a VN, Planetarian in this case, I wanted to write a story that showed in some sense the way Planetarian became an important part of my life. I’m sorry if you don’t like excessively long posts, but for those of you:
tl;dr: I loved Planetarian.
I now hereby present you this little part of my life that I tried to describe in a rather poetic way. This is my first attempt at English prose, so, apart from the message that I try to get across, I would appreciate it if those of you with even just a little bit of experience at writing stories would leave your thoughts about my writing skills. It would be best if you could point out any phrasing issues I might have, though I understand that this won’t be of the liking of many, so I don’t expect many responses including advise. 
The day in which I read Planetarian
The day in which I read Planetarian was a cloudy, windy, summer day. It was the 9th of August, and, like any summer day in Madrid, Spain’s capital, it was hot. However, the wind and sunlight-blocking clouds helped make it a day in which one could withstand the heat. Cars could be heard since the windows were open, and my mother and grandmother were chatting in the living room of the small apartment my grandmother owned.
I had gone to Madrid in order to visit my mother’s family, whom I couldn’t see except during the summer vacations and the Christmas holidays. Therefore, I didn’t have much to do while staying there, so I brought a couple VNs and an anime or two to keep me entertained during the siesta sessions my grandmother did.
I had gotten up at 10:00, since there wasn’t much for me to do during the long and boring mornings in Madrid. Once I was up and had had breakfast, I proceeded to start up my laptop and start reading Planetarian. As soon as the main menu appeared and Gentle Jena started playing, I couldn’t but allow myself an extra 5 minutes to enjoy that peaceful, yet somehow gloomy song.
Once determined to start reading, I made sure to have my notebook and a pen nearby, so that I could take notes on the go. I knew this was going to be a brief and intense experience. @Natsume had warned me that I was crazy thinking that I would be able to deal with the emotional impact of Side Stories, Planetarian, Rewrite and Tomoyo After in such a short time… I still thought that this was what I wanted. A powerful message that could pierce through my skin and reach the deepest part of my soul, only to leave a mark there that would forge me into a person a bit different that I was before.
I started reading. The initial setting was more or less the one I would expect from a generic post apocalyptic book or movie. However, I was captivated about how it is emphasized that even after humanity had shrunk to dangerously low numbers, governments still thrived for even a bigger human annihilation. I went on submerging myself into this generic, yet peculiar scene that Planetarian offered. Then, an stranger appeared. Well, to be honest, she was no stranger. I already knew that Yumemi was a robot that guarded that doomed city’s planetarium. Even knowing a bit about her, her uplifting dialogues caught me off guard and I couldn’t help but feel a bit irritated by seeing how her existence was a pure discordance in such a messed up world.
However, I didn’t let this put me off, and kept on reading. As soon as the Junker finished repairing Miss Jena and the projection began, I had no choice but to ramp up my note-taking pace. Beautiful images kept flashing and vanishing before my eyes. Yumemi’s sweet and jubilant voice shared her knowledge of the stars, and I couldn’t help but see a whole universe of possibilities in form of metaphors, hidden messages and unique quotes to explore. Then, the special Mankind spreading its Wings projection was set to begin, and I was ready to experience something incredible, something unique, but the music stopped and I felt at a loss for a second without knowing what to do. I even jumped a bit from the sofa I was sitting in. Silence engulfed the atmosphere. I instantly realized that Yumemi would have nowhere to recharge. It was the prelude of something horrible, or so I thought.
After a while, I realized that this wasn’t anything but a simple issue that could only postpone the inevitable glory that the special projection would bring. The special projection shone like the uttermost radiant star in the pitch dark universe that the world represented. I can’t describe the projections any better. They were just beautiful, to the point that they almost brought me to tears. Even then, the thought that Yumemi would stop moving forever at some point still loitered around in my mind.
It was 14:00, the normal time for us Spanish people to have lunch. I put Planetarian aside, but just physically. I was still thinking about the projections and about what many quotes could mean. I had cocido, a typical dish cooked in Madrid. It resembles a stew, but it is not as dense and it can be accompanied by as many ingredients as the cook wishes to include. As a dessert, I had a fresh slice of melon, something I am really grateful to be able to eat in hot summer days. However, this one was different. The clouds that covered the sky had acquired a darker tone and now menaced to rain at any moment. The wind strengthened and fought the trees as if it was angry that so many obstacles got in the way of its natural flow.
It was at this moment that I spontaneously grabbed a raincoat I brought from Barcelona with me and headed towards the door that separated the safety of the apartment from the dangers of the anger that Nature itself was showing. The obvious happened. My family went straight after me asking what was wrong. They inquired about why I would leave with such weather just after having eaten. Indeed, it was not a normal time for anyone to leave. It was, after all, the holy siesta time any advanced-age Spanish person would adore even more than God himself. I shrugged them off and told them that while they loved sleeping, I’d rather go out. Despite the weather, this simple explanation somehow convinced them and they let me be.
I headed out with my raincoat and a small backpack I always like to wear. I didn’t carry much. My mobile phone, some money, my notebook and, of course, my soulmate: my iPod. Once in the street, I had many possibilities to enjoy the day, but from all of them, I chose the one I thought that would be the most convenient for this day. I went to the nearest subway station and, thanks to Google Maps and the local subway map, I carefully planned the shortest and cheapest trip to my destination.
Compared to other European cities’ subways, Madrid’s is not as clean as others, however, I must say that it is the less crowded and fastest of the ones I’ve been able to use. After no more than 30 minutes, I exited the subway. It was now raining. I found myself facing an uphill climb that made me remember of CLANNAD’s one. At the top of this one, however, there was not a school. Instead, my destination stayed there, majestically, as if it had been waiting for me ever since the last time I visited it, which was when I was 8, more than 10 years ago. My destination had an special value to me, since it lightened up my curiosity for one of my biggest interests I’ve always had. In fact, I would even dare saying that I’m studying the degree I’m studying because of that building.
That building was, and still is, Madrid’s planetarium. I had decided that this day was the ideal one for me to re-discover such an important building for me. Unlike other’s, Madrid’s planetarium is quite small, and it’s mostly a place for children to discover and learn about the stars. They have two projection rooms. One would be used for the audience, while the other was somehow used for research, although I don’t really know how. I seized the opportunity and tried to imagine what Planetarian had shown me in there. I tried to picture Yumemi attending the few people interested in going to an slightly isolated place in a rainy day, just to see some false stars projected in an unconventional screen. I imagined too, how Yumemi would be alone at the building’s entrance, contemplating a neverending rain, hoping for everything to change and go back to how it used to be.
After this emotional and strange reunion between a human and a building, I proceeded to the counter to ask if there was any projection planned for today, to which the receptionist answered positively. For just 3.50€, I could enjoy a 45 minute projection. This was the first time I paid for a planetarium projection pass, and it surprised me how cheap it actually was. That, if we compare it to the cinema, which costs from 8 to 10€ depending on to which cinema and when you go.
Before the projection began, I spent my time walking around the installations. I found that there were two exposition halls: one with an explanation of black holes and how they were formed, and another one explaining how the reaction wheels in rockets worked. Along the round, kilometric corridors one could find himself swallowed by a huge display of meteor fragments and comet shards, as well as a bit of dust recovered by one of the explorations which had taken place in the Moon. These were all fragments of the vast world we live in, something that once again made me remember of a Planetarian quote that mentions humanity’s efforts to reach the stars.
It was then time to head to the projection room. And I almost ran late, since the usual projection room was out of service. I later learned that it was undergoing “technologic upgrades”, and once more, I couldn’t help but imagine the Junker trying to repair Miss Jena with the little resources he had. With this slight setback, I rushed to the alternative projection room, the one that apparently was used for serious research. To be honest, I found it to be a normal planetarium projection room, perhaps a bit smaller than others, but identical in design to the ones I had visited.
The projection began. Of course, it wasn’t as cinematographic as the one in Planetarian. It was rather oriented towards a girl explaining star and constellation facts and interacting with the audience, taking on questions and proposing easy quizzes for us to solve. That said, what really felt like Planetarian was the fact that there were just two three-member families sitting there with me. There was a certain sensation of tranquility. The same sensation I would have if I had been transported to another dimension, to a place where only I would be the only living being. A sense of alienation and ease filled the entirety of my body.
The projection ended as it developed: smoothly. I left the projection room and found myself facing the planetarium’s exit. Before me, a polluted city and torrential rain. Behind me, an oasis of peace and knowledge. To my disliking, I stepped out and dashed to the subway station. That rain was too much for a raincoat to handle. My socks were getting drenched and I started doubting the security the backpack could offer to my belongings. Thankfully, while in the subway and heading home, I felt relieved to find that my notebook hadn’t gotten wet. The last part of the way home implied a longer than desirable walk that put my notebook at a risk again, so I instead opted to wait for the rain to ease up in a nearby café.
Given the time I had, I ordered a hot coffee and sipped it while checking my Planetarian notes. “I reckon I have a long way before being a good note-taker…”, I thought. My notes were pure key words for me to remember about what to write and a bunch of quotes that appeared to be cool to me or from which I expected to extract some slightly far-fetched messages. Nothing extraordinary. Everything was scattered across two pages without any evident order. It still somehow made some sense to me, so I guess it wasn’t all that bad.
The rain eased up. Noticing this fact, I resumed my way home and, finally, arrived. My grandmother was waiting for me “grandmotherly” angry. You know, grandmothers never really get angry at their grandchildren, it is just that they worry way too much about them. I told her that I had gone to the planetarium, that there was nothing to worry about. The already darkened sky started loosing the little light it held and the streets started shifting from a dull grey light to a yellowish artificial one. It was now 20:30. 30 minutes remained until dinner time. Knowing that I wouldn’t be able to read much in 30 minutes, I resigned myself to my own thoughts, with my family chattering and the TV as a background noise.
We had dinner. This time we had some boiled vegetables and a generously seasoned salad. It wasn’t a great dinner, but I prefer these light ones to those full of meat and many side dishes. It was more or less 22:00. It was time for me to resume and end my starry journey in that obscure world. I grabbed the laptop again, booted it and opened Planetarian. This time I got to see the load menu. Despite it’s obvious lack of slots when compared to the other VN’s I had read, I found Planetarian’s to be the best designed load menu among the ones I had seen. It’s functions were crystal clear and included explanations for every possible action that could be executed.
I resumed the story. The Junker exited the planetarium with Yumemi and headed towards the outer quarantine wall. The atmosphere was tense. Danger could be perceived from the sole pale background that the visual novel showed. Yet, Yumemi managed to break that invisible barrier and ended with all the uneasiness thanks to her innocent attitude. By this time, I started thinking again about Yumemi’s battery life. I knew that her final moments were approaching. Then, the fiddler crab made his appearance. At first, I thought that the Junker wouldn’t have any issues against him, he seemed to have his ideas very clear in his mind. However, after a misfire and some Tom Clancy action, the climax arrived.
An image flashed for more or less a second. I saw that coming. I knew this was a KEY story after all… I did not cry, nor did I scream, nor did I get startled. I just continued reading in silence. A silence that felt heavier than my drenched backpack under the torrential rain. Against my will, I kept on taking notes of Yumemi’s last words. Loving Depths started playing as I began shredding tears.
The story ended. The credits rolled. I closed the laptop and headed towards the toilet to wash my face. I laid in the sofa for a bit, thinking about things… Even now I don’t know what I thought about. At just past midnight, I headed towards my bed. I grabbed the iPod and selected a Planetarian playlist I had prepared for this exact moment. I laid down and heard the beautiful OST. And while Gentle Jena was playing, I shed one more tear. And as that tear fell down, caressing my cheek, the day in which I read Planetarian, came to an end.
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I don’t think I have seen a post on Kazamatsuri that I have liked more than this. Say what you will about your English storytelling skill, this post got me absorbed in it. I was imagining myself reading alongside you, feeling exactly what you felt upon meeting yumemi.
The moment you said you were stepping out, I immediately thought to myself “no, no, you are not just doing that” but you did. And I am proud of you. And when you said:
I cracked up, being a Filipino and knowing the spanish importance of siesta.
All that said, I think that’s all you need to say. I’ve never said much about planetarian because I think there’s nothing else that needs to be said. It is flawless in its approach, and leaves you with a message worth internalizing. I’m glad you’ve enjoyed it, and welcome you as a fellow starteller.
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And thus began the road to even more tears, as what the future holds in store for you is just as heartbreaking, if not more, than what you have just experienced.
(tl;dr Read Hoshi no Hito!)
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Thanks for your replies and thanks to all of you who read it!
Thanks, @pepe, that boosted my confidence up and I’ll try to write some story from time to time.
Too bad that my unstable Internet connections this week isn’t allowing for more posting, but I’m preparing a Planetarian analysis that I’ll post once I return to Barcelona.
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Is Planetarian HD Edition available or coming to Steam?
They haven’t said anything about it.
Warning, long analysis post
Planetarian: one of the most accessible VNs in the occidental market. With a price of just 5€ during sale seasons, this VN is one of the best options for those who want to experience a new storytelling media.
For me, as one of the KEY VNs I had yet to read, I installed it in my laptop and brought it with me to Madrid, where I had about 10 days to experience this and other KEY VNs. One of those days was a day I planned around reading Planetarian. It was quite an experience for me, and I encourage you to read my slightly long story about it.
This time however, I want to talk more objectively about what I thought that Planetarian did well and not so well. However, to be honest, I don’t know how to start. I have many things to talk about. I guess most of the times, stories start from the beginning, so I’ll talk about the origins of the world Planetarian takes place in.
Our story takes place in Earth. One would think that this is obvious, but we are told that humanity had colonized the Moon. This also tells us that the story is set in the mid term future, perhaps in 100 years, maybe 150, but definitely not many more. This time data can be extracted from the Junker saying that some things looked like technology from the last century. In such an advanced world, where proper humanoid robots are a thing, we set the main point for our timeline. At this point, overpopulation and resource shortages are the main worry of the governments. Perhaps it is as a result of this problem that these worried governments got associated and ramped up their space program budgets, in search for places with the resources needed to sustain humanity’s growth. Space colonies were stablished in the Moon and a plan for humanity to keep on developing was plotted.
Except perhaps the governments weren’t thinking about the whole humanity, but just their respective countries. The slow pace at which the whole colonization project was taking place wasn’t enough and the people with the most power in the world didn’t like it. They tried to accelerate the process to save their own country through the expropriation of others’ resources, even if that implied destroying the hopes of an insane amount of innocent people. With this in mind, the invasion of a space colony was the spark needed for the explosion of madness and death to occur. Nuclear and biological weapons reduced the human beings count by 3 digits at least and modified Earth to the point it would be raining forever.
This is the first stopping point for us to analyze what has happened. First of all, I’d like to point out that this distopia isn’t as unlikely as it looks like. We are currently running short on some natural resources, specially fossilized hydrocarbons like petrol, gas and carbon. While we have other technologies on the works, nuclear power is our best ally in the short term, but keep in mind that uranium and plutonium are also limited (although there is still a lot to be used before we run out). Even if we manage to develop solar and eolic power to a greater potential, there is a possibility that such technologies will not be enough to sustain the growing human species. We are already looking to the nearest planets to emigrate and colonize them. With a manned mission to Mars not far from our present, it looks to me like we might be close to that distopia.
What Planetarian shows us here is that humanity should be prepared for the worst. We tend to postpone problems and don’t like putting many efforts into solving matters that affect the whole humanity or Earth if they get in the way of some selfish localized interests. An example of this is Global Warming, although I won’t go into detail about this particular concern. My point is that we are reminded that the worst could happen and we might find ourselves forced to lower our living standards or to regulate our population growth. While doing any of these could be an offense to many of us, not doing so could end up like in Planetarian. A fight for resources would be almost assured and only disgrace could follow. Knowing what could happen, we could prepare ourselves, both from a country’s perspective and from a personal perspective (physically and mentally), for what we would have to give up for humanity to persist. This message is something quite important, at lest for me, and I would put it among one of Planetarian’s main messages.
Also, since I mentioned the rain, let me expand upon it. The eternal rain is, by definition, a diluvium. According to the Genesis (First book in the Bible and the Torah), God wanted to clear all live from Earth and reset everything leaving just a pair of animals of each species and Noah’s family, a honest person who believed in God. Anyway, I think this diluvium is making a reference to this. Since humanity obviously made many mistakes and caused too big a damage for themselves to be able to repair it, the rain acts as a punishment and it’s destructive characteristics exist to reset the world and create a new generation of live afterwards.
Let’s now follow the story a bit more. In this Pandemonium, not happy with the despair caused, the remaining governments started to send mechanized extermination units, or more directly put, robots designed to eliminate any survivors.
And now we stop once again to meditate about why these people would want to cause any more harm than the one they already caused. I find myself at a loss when I try to think a logical explanation. Don’t people get tired of fighting each other after 10 years of constant destruction? Aren’t governments made of people with families who they love more than the country they represent? I sincerely think that nothing like this would happen in our world. This would make me think that such robots are a cheap plot device used for the last events in the VN, but since the fiddler crab is a defense oriented robot, I’ll discard this theory. Now, without much to work with, I’ll turn to you and ask you: What do you think about the way the killer robots were introduced to the world. Does it hide a message?
The robots themselves are another important topic by themselves. During my reading time of the VN I could classify all the robots into 3 types. The human-serving ones (Yumemi), with an apparent emotional intelligence; the human-killing ones (the small hunter robots), that swarm their prey and won’t let it scape, and the fiddler crab.
The fiddler crab is a very interesting robot. Its function was to defend the city it had been placed in. It adopted an overwatch position and looked for intruders of that prohibited area. However, when the Junker attacked it, the crab (as I’ll call it for short) looked more like a scared animal, doing everything it could to defend himself. It strafed doing evasive maneuvers while shooting repetitively it’s 13mm machine gun. Even after it only had 3 operational legs, the crab decided to use it’s railgun at a very short range, knowing that firing it with 3 legs would affect its own frame. This made me think that even a robot designed to kill (even if for the sake of defending an area), it possessed a fair amount of intelligence, or at least emotions. In this case, fear and a self conservation sense.
Yumemi was a humanoid robot, and many more had existed like her. She was the personification of Asimov’s ideal for a robot. A robot that would serve humanity to the point of giving its own life and one that would never ever under any circumstance try to cause harm to a human. However, this idea is a bit cold, and the fact that KEY decided to present Yumemi as a buggy and worn robot was great for this topic. Yumemi’s emotional intelligence benefited greatly from her bugs and defects. Since she was designed to keep learning during its operational lifespan, the fact that she tended to talk all that much meant that she would receive many new pieces of information that she would then include in her database. If you look closely at that fact, you realize that she acted like an innocent child. She didn’t actually know much about the common information a human would need to live in society, but she kept on asking about it and learning it little by little, just like children would ask their parents about everything they didn’t understand.
There isn’t much to say about the hunter robots. They were programmed to kill humans and that’s what they do.
If we contrast all the information we have about robots, one would think that we have a good type, a neutral type and an evil one. Does this really mean that there are good robots, neutral robots and evil robots? I’d say no. The ones who were good, neutral or evil were the ones who designed those robots. There were people with good heart, who wanted to help others and thought that sharing knowledge was a good starting point, thus creating Yumemi. There were people who feared for their lives and seeked protection from attackers. These people transmitted their fears to the design of the crab. There were ill-minded people who seeked death, the annihilation of their enemies and human life itself. These people too, put their most sincere feelings into the creation of the hunter robots.
After all, robots aren’t good or bad. They’ll be as good or as bad as we want them to be. And this isn’t something all that good. Would you dare say that Yumemi’s way of being is just the reflection of the feelings a group of people had? No, negating Yumemi’s personality would almost imply denying Planetarian itself. Here, one message overlaps with another. Yumemi’s outgoing personality and the fact that she has her own dreams and aspirations reference a question many people ask themselves: up to which point do we want robots to be able to learn on the go and to have a unique personality? I’ll leave this one open to you, but, in my opinion, Asimov’s laws are compatible with a fully intelligent being like I consider Yumemi was.
Now that I’m talking about Yumemi’s personality, I’d like to, sadly, recall her last moments. She was obviously broken beyond all repair, but her memories were stored in a memory card. She was ok with inserting that memory card in another frame. Would you consider that that new frame was Yumemi? If so, then, what would death be for a robot? Should robots die? Should they even be asked if they want to die or not once they reach the end of their operational lifespan? Robots should have a beginning and an end for their lives. Robots like Yumemi have reached an intelligence state in which they can make such a choice. Robots like Yumemi should, in my opinion, have a fair amount of control over their lives.
Oh my! Isn’t Planetarian full of philosophical potential? Well, enough of philosophical chatter anyway. Let’s bring the article down a level. I’ll now attack metaphors.
Let’s start with the world and the planetarium. Obviously, the world is, vulgarly put, fucked up. The planetarium appears to be, however, an oasis amidst a crumbling universe. The planetarium too, acts as a gate to a more cheerful universe, a universe full of possibilities. It’s the universe projected in it’s hemispheric screen and the universe evoked by Yumemi’s commentary. Therefore, the planetarium represents humanity’s last hope. It’s humanity’s only possible transition from the cruelty of their current universe to the radiance of the new universe.
Next up we have a long metaphor. It’s the one the whole projection represents. From its beginning to the very ending after the Yumemi’s commentary without projection. It’s shown how at the beginning, there is day. That’s the apogee of humanity. Everything is bright, but all brightness dimes away as night comes. Night isn’t dangerous by itself, but it is a moment of uneasiness. It is the uneasiness brought by the scarce amount of resources left in Earth. Humanity is now faced with a problem of uttermost importance. How will it react? As the title for the special projection says, it’s time for Mankind Spreading its Wings. That’s what humanity is supposed to do. It should give its best and find another place to live in, using cooperation to achieve this goal faster and in an easier way, instead, the sound in the VN freezes, the projection stops, and Yumemi doesn’t know what to do. Humanity decided to remain forever still. Time froze also for humanity. They decided to keep their issues and not to solve them. Mankind did not spread its wings…
There is in this projection a mention to Perseus and Andromeda. Now, I didn’t know Andromeda was a constellation, I always thought that it was a galaxy (which, in fact, is), but for the time, I’ll assume that it is a constellation. Yumemi states that Perseus and Andromeda are chained to the sky, or to the night we might say. If we consider the night as the doomed world the story takes place in, we can think about these two subjects being Yumemi and the Junker, chained in a horrible world, set to die sooner or later (more sooner than later though). I’m not convinced with this metaphor myself, so, once again, I turn to you. I seek your thoughts on this matter.
At this point, I’m done with metaphors. These were the most significant ones I could find, although I’m sure you’ll be able to find even more. One more time, let’s step down the game a level. On to quotes.
I’ll steal something @Kanon said when commenting on Shiori’s route in the Kanon Bookclub (ironic, huh?). He said that the entirety of Shiori’s route was very quotable. Well, let me say that the entirety of Planetarian was very quotable. And it is true. Fragments quotable because of their deep meaning, fragments quotable because of their sentimental value, fragments quotable because of their good-quality writing… Everything was pretty much quotable in a way or another. I’ll leave some of my favorite quotes here with a brief explanation of why I chose them.
“I pray that you will never forget the starry sky. When you are lost in the dark and can no longer see the stars in the sky, please remember what you have seen here today. This is my little reverie.”
Here I see a robot expressing a wish. This also leads to the metaphors I explained. The dark being the ruined world and the planetarium being the last hope.
“If I just walked into its midst, I would be able to return. Back to the world that I had lived in since the day I was born, back to the world in which I had no choice but to live. However, that was not her world.”
A human showing true concern about a robot. It’s also well written and presented to the reader.
“Please, do not divide Heaven in two.”
This one was quite impactful. I’ve always heard of Heaven, and when I asked about dogs, cats… The typical response that they go the the dogs’ Heaven and such was what I got in return. It just made me think for a while about it, and I found it of value.
“I’m a robot. For me, my customers’ smiling faces are the most important things. And yet, I seem to always end up causing so many discourtesies for my customers.”
Pure emotional value. It was a sad realization to have just before dying…
“The thing that was broken was not me, but… Why did everything break?”
Just beautiful. So many emotions and messages conveyed in such a short fragment. Sadness, impotence, agony, ignorance… It also shows how Yumemi was capable of some deep thought. This is my favorite one by the way.
“Where were the stars now? Where would I have to go in order to see them? I walked forth into these fractured world, yet my thoughts were forever of the sky.”
What a way to end it. The last part shows how the Junker had gone throughout an important character development. He started being cynical and inflexible, and was now comprehensive and able to think beyond his immediate present and about just his survival.
This is it for the quotes. I’ll now talk a bit in general about some general VN topics.
One thing I want to praise is the visuals. It wasn’t HD version Planetarian, but just having sprites that included from the knees upwards allowed for a full set of gestures and an expressivity I hadn’t seen in any other VN. The CGs, even though scarce, were of very high quality. The small GIF features added a lot to the immersion. The rain, the flicker in Yumemi’s last projection, the smoke… It was just splendid.
About the music I can’t say much. It was the typical for a KEY OST. A voiced ending, two very emotionally intense songs (Gentle Jena and Loving Depths) and a set of ambience and more comedic or light-hearted tracks. I want to emphasize how much I loved Gentle Jena and Loving Depths. When these two tracks played during the projection and during the end, I felt really moved. They occupy now an special spot in my iPod. Gentle Jena is a very peaceful and simple tone, that carries a sadness tone with it. It sounds a bit like a requiem to me. On the other hand, Loving Depths sounds very pure and innocent, just like Yumemi’s personality. The strings playing on the background, however, add a sense of heaviness to the music. They seem to make the reader remember that something important happened.
I also want to praise how this story was a bit out of KEY’s ordinary male main character and tones of female heroines with problems to solve. Only two characters were required to make Planetarian a unique experience. Perhaps this is because of its short length, maybe it’s because it didn’t have any choices that it was easier to do, but now I’m looking forward to reading other short Kinetic Novels. Harmonia is apparently about to come. Let’s hope it doesn’t get delayed much more…
With a minimum cast, a short amount of text, a reduced OST and some CGs less than usual, KEY was able to produce a small VN the impact of which is just as great or even greater than in other of their productions. Bravo for Planetarian.
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There’s new information on planetarian world in the blog of Yuichi Suzumoto, who is the writer of planetarian.
It reveals why the staff members of the planetarium didn’t turn off Yumemi though he says it is not an official creation.
It seems there are also some information on the movie pamphlet including chronicle of the planetarian world.
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First blog post in 3 years, first few tweets in 2 years: I think the bigger news here is that Suzumoto is alive.
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I love how he just launches straight into talking about the currently airing anime and about how knives are drawn in Sweetness&lightning. I really hope he at least starts tweeting regularly again. Incidentally, I have no idea what he’s saying in most of that blog post. Maybe someone can give a rough translation?
Planetarian. What a great VN (or KN, whatever).
Now that I got that of my chest, let’s talk about it a bit more, okay? Good.
First off, when first starting the Novel, I decided to this time try to analyze the main menu theme before actually starting to read, to see what it tells me about the story I’m about to experience and if my guesses based on the theme actually come true. So, the main menu theme (Gentle Jena) gave me a feeling of loneliness with a glimmer of hope somewhere in there. Another thing I noted was how the left hand always went back to the same note, which let me to assume that there’s going to be some form of stationary-ness or someone restricted to one place.
So do we find these things? Well, the Junker definitely is in a hopeless situation before meeting Yumemi, and Yumemi is as well before meeting the Junker, actually. Both find new fullfillment in each other as Yumemi can actually serve a human again, what for her is her purpose in life, and the Junker finds a new purpose in life when he sees the stars. And with that purpose comes hope, which I predicted. And for someone restricted to a place, Yumemi definitely fits the bill, as she had to stay at that planetarium. And even as she accompanies the Junker, she states she can only leave in a 3-kilometre radius, as otherwise she can’t find her way back.
Overall, I found this VN to be very minimalistic compared to other Key-works, but still definitely good. I would kind of call it a bottle show both compared to other Key-Novels and to other works in an post-apocalyptic setting, although I know that this is stretching the term and not the original definition. Still, it is what it reminded me of.
As with the other work I read from Suzumoto, Kotomi’s route in Clannad, it is big on the foeshadowing department, and I really like that style. And it also seems that he likes to touch on religious, particularly christian, matters.
This story also has a believable future for the most part, although it is sad that I can see humanity destroying itself in such spectacular fashion.
Now for some of the big discussions in this thread:
First off, my two cents on the religious aspect:
It was already established that this story most likely takes its symbolism from Christianity. And from what I learned by talking with other people from my church in meetings with people of my age and such, that doesn’t conflict with catholic beliefs. I am no priest though, nor have I studied theology, so I might still be wrong, but as the pries of our parish didn’t veto anything back then, I’m assuming that the following should be correct.
So how the whole afterlife works from how I understand is that once you die you basically meet god and reflect on your life. To try to understand it better, we compared that anything sinful you did is the same as hurting god, some things indirect, some direct, and you’re basically feeling bad for that when you’re confronted by god. This feeling is basically the concept of Purgatory if I understood that correctly. It definitely is no literal fire you’re burning inside. Now after that you’re basically put before the decision if you want to live for eternity with god and his love, which would be called heaven, or if you want to live for eternity without god and his love, which would be called hell. Those are all basically more concepts and less actual places. Also, all this more or less happens outside the concept of time as well, which is why it’s so difficult to grasp. And since this all happens after you die, it theoretically doesn’t matter what you did in your life or what faith, if any, you had, although the amount of “time” or “severity”, for lack of better terms, of Purgatory would be bigger if you’d done a lot of bad stuff. In our discussion that then let to the more or less philosophical question if that means that even people like Adolf Hitler can get into heaven, to which the simple answer was “Yes”, since god forgives everyone, but that’s a whole 'nother topic. Back to Planetarian.
Now, as someone here also said (sorry, it is late and I don’t want to go through those 173 posts again who specifically said that), most afterlife stories are very human-centric, so there’s still the question if Yumemi would even go to heaven. Now if we assume for a moment that other sentient life exists in the universe, our beliefs about afterlife would probably expand to include all sapient beings, so the question we need to ask is “Is Yumemi a sapient being?” And, hey, that was one of the other discussions here! This is actually a common topic in Science Fiction regarding AI, Star Trek TNGs “The Measure of a Man” springs to mind. The thing to note is that Trek’s AIs (Data in TNG, the Doctor in Voyager) are very much programmed and are yet considered more than just objects. And I would say that the same is true for Yumemi. Wikipedia defines sapience as “the ability of an organism or entity to act with appropriate judgement”. So do we see such an instance of her reacting to a situation with proper judgement? And what would be proper judgement? To the second question I would say actions that are in line with a being’s moral groundings. Yumemi possesses these, which are probably a combination of Asimov’s laws and her general wish to serve humanity (although that one’s kinda in Asimov’s second law). With that, I would say that both decisions that lead her trying to protect the Junker, her accompanying him and her protecting him, are born of proper judgement. Especially the second one, as she disobeys a direct order from the Junker here, which means that it was a more complex problem.
Also, I think I’ll be doing the same what @Mogaoscar did and visit a planetarium soon, relatively speaking. I am fortunate enough that one of the schools of my home town is hosting a yearly festival that’s called “Lange Nacht der Sterne” (“Long night of stars” in english). This school also has an observatory and such a presentation of celestial bodies is usually a part of the festival. Since that usually happens in summer, I said relatively speaking, since it’ll be almost a year from now.
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After doing a rereading I took note of Junker’s quote “When the Rain came, it obliterated the seasons” because I think that it shows the Planetarian world is changing for the better when the snow begins at the end because the seasons are returning while also being symbolism of his change of heart.
Also, I have become a bit confused about the figurative meaning of the Rain. At first I thought it symbolized all that is bad with humanity because it poisons and pollutes the land, making it unlivable and it is repeated constantly “The Rain continued to fall”, expressing that the war continues despite the people who started it having perished long ago. The reason the meaning behind this confused me is because of one of the last things Yumemi says “I really do love the Rain (or when it rains)”. It is established that she likes it when it is raining because it brings more customers to the planetarium but then I thought maybe that is the figurative meaning; when the bad of humanity starts to dominate, people come to the planetarium to find hope again. Another way of looking at it is that she has come to accept all the bad and all the good of the world, that would be a revelation most divine but it just doesn’t seem very like Yumemi even when her tone changes in her final scenes.
I’m interested to hear what others have to say about this.
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There is a sort of Velveteen Rabbit property to that, like how something worth loving becomes, like, real. It could be that it’s like that, like even if that wasn’t true at first, Yumemi made it worth believing in and it became true because its time had come, thanks to someone who believed her.
It’s more like Yumemi held out a torch for humanity all those years and the Junker eventually found it. You had it right with someone finding what was lost for the moment by going to see the stars when they can’t be viewed naturally for whatever reason, and it having a far more profound effect when humanity in general seems to be in danger of forgetting them - and to look up in general - for good.
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Got the V(K)N half price on Steam and I really enjoyed it despite the short length and lack of choice-making. I could guess pretty much each turn the story took in advance but this is one of those occasions when it’s about the experiences of the journey and not the mere arrival, and never lost my interest. With a little editing, would make an excellent conventional novella.
Haven’t read all the comments in depth but there many interesting points and for me the story revolved around how will we define our perception of living or not living for our creations of AI/Robots/Smart Automata that actually look and sound human; and all the issues that surround that.
This has been explored on TV or movies many times e.g. Bladerunner, the BSG re-imagining, Westworld and the UK TV show ‘Humans’, but I found Yumemi very engaging and soon stopped thinking about her as just a smart automaton. Now she is still essentially a collection of wiring, OS, algorithms, databases and even pre-programmed pseudo emotions but it seems to me that the Junker and the staff at the planetarium valued Yumemi and came to regard her as much of a living being with feelings as anyone else and no mere servant/slave. Yumemi did make offhand statements that could be seen as philosophical and maybe not just a result of clever coding but possibly more heuristic behaviour.
We can debate over whether sentience, sapience, true self-determination, questioning and a “soul” or real emotions are more important that just DNA, biological and neurological processes in the fuzzy definition “what is it to be alive/human?”. It’s such minefield in terms of if we can regard a robot/AI as a human then is the logical step giving the same legal rights to them and moral responsibilities for us? It may just be that the real question is whether our species is truly ready in an evolutionary rather than technological sense to create “artificial human” androids/gynoids
And what if Yumemi had a very non-human appearance, would we still feel the same? Well we know how some people love pets and treat them almost as real people too - would even risk their own lives to save them, so is an empathy with Yumemi simply an extension of that apparently innate caring response?
So many questions raised of which this is just one…
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Just finished it. Beautiful VN despite how short it is.
I didn’t like the main protagonist at all when I started it. I thought he was a selfish jerk, but as he started to warm up to Yumemi I started to like him more. Yumemi may have been clueless and extremely talkative, but she was purely a huge sweetheart. It was refreshing to see her optimism and positivity throughout the story.
Also, did “Perfectly Human” remind anyone else of Majora’s Mask final hours?
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