I keep meaning to… I guess I’l go do that right now
Wow. That brought back some emotional memories. I agree, it is very well done, and expansion is good word for it. Hmm, sitting here trying to think of the words to describe it… its like there are two endings and one ending at the same time. It satisfied my wish for a little more of that world, while still leaving it open. It reinforced the beauty of the stars that exists despite the lonely world, and it didn’t ruin the feelings I had from the original ending. Thanks for reminding me about it 
I only found out about Hoshi no Hito yesterday! I can’t believe it took me so long to find out about it. I’ll have to give it a listen.
The Planetarian Bookclub has officially started! Please use this topic to discuss the game.
I must say, that Planetarium sequence is really beautiful. I can very much empathize with the Junker’s awe at the whole spectacle, even after the power outage. For just a few minutes, nothing exists besides the Planetarium, and you can immerse yourself in the presentation completely.
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Bonus points if you played with the lights out 
Well I’ll definitely play the game with the lights out, but with my first move through the game (to get Music Mode and show a friend of mine a little tidbit, which I will talk about).
Here’s the tidbit. On Board 8 of GameFAQs we have a group that plays a ‘pick your favorite’ type of game constantly and call ourselves the Gauntlet Crew and create join.me chats to host these games and obviously to chat. I made one today to honor Planetarian, naming it “WelcometothePlanetarium” and making my name Yumemi Hoshino… so about an hour ago, that friend asked how I could like that girl, due to revelation that she was a robot.
So I showed him the stars. And had him listen to Gentle Jena during it. And even thinking about these emotions again make me tear up. I love that part of the game. He was drunk at the time so I couldn’t get too much of a serious opinion out of him, but he might be willing for me to show him more of it, some time, and I really hope to.
I’m generally not one for visual novels, but planetarian came highly recommended, and it was on sale on steam so why not?
When it opened with chimes playing “What a friend we have in Jesus” the words to the parody song “when this lousy war is over” sang in my head. I was amused then (“haha, I’ll have a hard time taking this seriously”). but I by the time I was done, it turned out to be strangely appropriate. I have a military background (and the technical details were good, which I found really helped me self-insert as the junker), so when I was told it was a sad tale, I replied with usual machismo “sure, whatevs brah!”
2 hours later when I’m asked why the world broke, I could barely croak out a pathetic “I don’t know!”
It seemed to me that she, in a way, wanted to believe everything she said about humanity overcoming it’s problems and was willfully ignoring what had happened to the world, that the idea that she was broken instead of the world was comforting to her. To be forced to face reality in her final moments seemed too cruel.
I’m glad I had the foresight to play this in the dark. It helped!
Hoshi no Hito, eh? I am hungry to know more about this world, good stuff.
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I really love the differences that I noticed between planetarian and other Key VNs that have been discussed.
I like that not really that much happens in a pretty small area in a short story, yet it is still entertaining and has it’s own charm about it.
I very much liked the back-story and scene they set for it, like when Junker was telling the history, explaining how the population of humans eventually got really tiny I thought that it’s pretty crazy awful.
I loved the element of the never-ending rain, not only just for atmosphere but it is a pretty cool concept, very much emphasised right before Yumemi stands in between the fight and he’s wounded, the constant reminders of “The Rain still falls” throughout (with an uppercase r each time it’s mentioned). Rewrite Kinda similar to how every mention of the moon in Rewrite has an uppercase m.
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Okay, so I’m like… 19 minutes in (we’re fixing Jena right now) and it’s quite a struggle. The first time I read it, it felt very slow. This time, since I’ve already read it, just feels like every minute is a minute of time I could spend doing something more interesting… The rain and the calming music don’t help at all.
The only payoff for the VN for me is the ending. I don’t really care about the setting or the flawed mechanics of some annoying robot, so planetarian doesn’t appeal to me much.
Wow Bonecuss, I didn’t notice that detail about Rewrite!
On that note, I feel like in many ways planetarian is a prototype of Rewrite. They both feature very similar themes. It’s almost like Rewrite was their attempt at expanding on planetarian’s scenario. @On_TheBounce, of all of Key’s games, I’d probably recommend this to your the most if you liked planetarian.
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Rewrite Because I knew that one of the routes was called Moon, I picked up on pretty much all of the subtle mentioning of the moon when I played through. In some cases it felt very strange that they’d be mentioning the moon so often. I seem to remember Kotarou meeting Touka in one of the routes and she mentions “Isn’t the moon bright tonight?”. Kotarou would in some scenes be out in the city at night and mention “The Moon was bright tonight”.
Some of the mentions of the Rain felt similar.
And yeah I liked that there were shared themes between the games. I very much loved the themes in both of them and I hope they’ll explore more things like that in the future.
Okay guys, keep the discussion flowing! Take notes while you’re playing of things that come to mind that you’d like to talk about here. Let’s analyse planetarian as thoroughly as we can over these next two weeks!
We’re also now accepting recorded messages! Maybe you want to tell us what you thought of planetarian, or you have some topic or question you’d like us to address on the podcast? Record a short voice clip, link it here and if we like it, we’ll include it!
Also! I’ve extended the bookclub by 2 weeks! You’ll all have more time to chat here, and prepare artwork to submit!
I finished Planetarian and it was very enjoyable for the time and money invested. Yumemi now places pretty high on my list of Key heroines(9/32), she caught my interest very quickly. Having Kanata/Shizuru´s voice helped but I was hooked when they had a line like, -This unit has an error causing it to talk for long periods without consideration of time or place-(paraphrasing), that was hilarious and she proved it to be true that’s for sure. One exchange that made me laugh hard was when the Junker tells Yumemi to be quiet as a high priority, she accepts but after about 5 seconds she continues talking, certain people can take stuff that normally would be annoying and make it extremely funny.
Since Planetarian is around half the length of the common route of Rewrite or LB it helps incredibly much to have an instantly likeable character as opposed to someone like Lucia who picks up after some time. The entire novel lives or dies depending on this character. Now you could look at Planetarian and see some philosophical stuff but that’s not my cup of tea, I just like the emotions and it did a great job on that part.
Planetarian has inspired me to do a lot of thinking (some of which I hope to talk about in future posts), but for now I’ll just share the emotional impact it had on me.
Although this was the first Key visual novel I’d ever had the pleasure of experiencing, I already knew beforehand that their stories had quite the reputation for making people cry–it’s the one thing you can count on people in comments sections to joke about when any of Key’s games are under discussion: “Have a box of tissues ready,” and so on and so forth. I just took it as so much internet hyperbole, one of those things that people enjoy saying for comedic effect but gets worn out from overuse. I was very excited to play a Key game for the first time, but I did not for a second really think that it would bring me to tears. Fictional stories just generally don’t have that effect on me, and I didn’t see why Planetarian should be any different.
But then I actually met Yumemi–so clearly a robot despite her highly sophisticated programming, and yet still strangely captivating. During her entire “death” scene, to my astonishment I really was crying. More than that, by the end of it I had to actively restrain myself so my weeping would not become audible and cause my family to ask me what was wrong! Against all of my expectations (and most of my experience with entertainment of different kinds), this simple, 2-3 hour story reduced me to tears.
What was it that caused this reaction? How could such a short story produce such powerful emotions and feelings? Everyone will have a different answer to go with their own experience, but I hope to offer my own thoughts in a later post. Suffice to say, I was blown away by how much Planetarian moved me, and I’ll definitely play Clannad with a similar expectation (and maybe a box of tissues at the ready!).
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It’s really special to find people who are experiencing Key for the first time. Thank you so much for sharing that experience with us! Hopefully we’ll see you around talking about your first time reading Clannad in the near future!
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My pleasure, thank you for creating this website and forum so that there’s a place to talk about these things! Even though they’re getting more exposure in the West than ever before, visual novels are still very niche, so it’s great to be able to come to this forum and talk with other fans right after finishing Planetarian.
As for Clannad, I hope so too! 
Also, @therationalpi: The development of Yumemi’s leitmotif didn’t really strike me until you pointed it out. Thanks for talking about the soundtrack in such detail, the music in things like this matters a great deal to me too!
Here’s the first part of my thoughts on Planetarian (be warned that it is on the lengthy side). I hope it will lead to further discussion!
Planetarian: An Analysis (Part 1)
Despite its short length, Planetarian’s story is striking indeed. The apparent disproportion between the novel’s simplicity and its emotional power led me to wonder: why did this story touch me so? Before I can give my answer, though, it is necessary for me to spend some time talking about the pervasive spiritual themes that are present in the story. As such, the purpose of this post is to draw attention to these themes.
Upon reading Planetarian with a careful eye it quickly becomes evident that the story is filled with religious elements, the most obvious example of this being the novel’s ongoing discussion of prayer and Heaven. It begins when the Junker, in an offhand remark, suggests to Yumemi that she pray to God that the projector be repaired in time for the next day’s 11:00 AM presentation. Yumemi, dutiful robot that she is, promptly asks in response, “Which god should I pray to, then?” A lengthy and somewhat humorous exchange follows in which Yumemi decides she should pray to Dionysus because the Junker would like him best, to which he replies that she should instead pray to “the god of robots.” After scanning her data banks for this entity, she declares: “I cannot find the information you have requested in my base databases or in my accumulated databases.”
On its own this conversation would easily pass as nothing more than a comical interlude, but it leads to more serious musings later in the novel. Not long after the previous exchange, Yumemi recalls an occasion where she asked her co-workers if robots have a Heaven as well. They assured her this was so, and that the Heaven of robots is a place where “everything that a robot wished for would come true.” The Junker, despite internally dismissing the notion of robot Heaven as nothing more than a “frivolous joke,” adds on to the idea by telling Yumemi, “The God of Robots lives in the Heaven of Robots. Remember this.” She accepts this statement “as if it were the most natural thing in the world.”
Moments later, Yumemi takes things in a more personal direction when she asks the Junker a simple but piercing question: “Have you ever prayed to God?” He answers that while he may have prayed before, he never expected anything. When he asks Yumemi the same thing she begins to say that she has a prayer for the God of Robots pertaining to Heaven, but she is cut short by her mandatory 12:00 AM shutdown, leaving the nature of her prayer a mystery.
The subject comes up again when Yumemi and the Junker are heading out of the city. Interestingly, she asks him the exact same question as she did before, “Have you ever prayed to God,” and the Junker even notes that she already asked him this. It never becomes clear why Yumemi asks this question a second time, but in any case it prompts the Junker to remind her that she never finished telling him what her prayer is. What she says is unexpected: “Please do not divide Heaven in two,” separating robots from humans. As she puts it, she wants “to be able to be of aid to everyone, now and forever.” She repeats this prayer to the Junker at the end of the story in her final moments, saying she does not need the Heaven of self-satisfaction her co-workers once promised her. Rather, if she must go to Heaven her only desire is that “Heaven not be split in two” so that she may “work on the behalf of humans for all of eternity.”
It is clear enough just from how frequently these two themes of prayer and Heaven recur in the story that Planetarian has an interesting preoccupation with spiritual matters, but these are hardly the only examples to be found. There are also several telling tidbits from the Junker’s narration that reveal a decidedly religious bent to the story as well. To begin with, when the Junker first enters the planetarium he likens it to a place of worship: “Had all the chairs been populated with people, it would seem almost as if those people were worshipping the ant [i.e., the projector].” (He even extends the comparison by later noting that the projector’s control panel resembles a church organ.) This observation then leads him to remember an idol he once saw that had been made by the local villagers and was worshipped by them in the hope of stopping the nuclear Rain.
Later, during his repairs of the projector, the Junker also recalls a time in his life when missionaries told people about the heavenly bodies “in reverent voices, as if they were reciting verses from their mold-ridden holy books.” When the projector is finally fixed and Yumemi is making one final call to the streets for people to come to the planetarium, he notes that her voice resembles a “requiem mass,” which is a Catholic Mass offered for the souls of dead people. During the presentation itself he describes Yumemi as “a priestess telling of oracular visions.” Finally, when he and Yumemi are leaving the planetarium he reflects, “In the space of one hour, I felt as if I had already done a decade’s worth of penance.”
Beyond the visual novel proper, there are even further religious references in some of the supplementary material. The second drama CD is titled “Jerusalem,” and it tells a story about the Great War (mentioned by the Junker in Planetarian) where a group of soldiers are all killed by a sniper—who just happens to be a nun. The third drama CD, “Man of the Stars,” features three children whose names are Levi, Ruth and Job, all major biblical figures. The opening of the light novel from which the drama CDs are derived even reads, “Starry sky, words, God, robots. A collection of short stories in the key of these four themes.”
In closing, it is plain to see that Planetarian is to a great extent permeated with religious and spiritual themes. But do all these conversations and scattered references have any deeper meaning? Is there a coherent message underlying them, or have they been included just for the sake of “spicing up” the story? (To put it another way, are we witnessing a case of what TV Tropes calls “faux symbolism”?)
Personally, given the sheer quantity of religiously oriented content contained in the novel (including some references I haven’t mentioned yet but will in the next post), I find it extremely unlikely that it is all in there just to “add color.” I think a coherent religious message can most definitely be pieced together from the content of the story, and in the next post I will describe what I believe it to be.
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I was just waiting to see this mentioned. Hoshi no Hito felt like a very religious story to me and I never really bothered to ask why it did. Felt like something from a weird Sci-Fi old testament.
