Planetarian

Genre: Visual Novel

Players: 1

.

Review:

(Note: This game is included in Planetarian: The Reverie of a Little Planet & Snow Globe, along with Planetarian: Snow Globe.)

Planetarian, sometimes bearing the subtitle The Reverie of a Little Planet, is a Visual Novel originally released on PC in Japan in 2004, with various ports afterward but its first release in the West was in 2013 on iOS, then 2014 on PC, with a port to Nintendo Switch in 2019. Planetarian takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where humanity has been almost entirely wiped out by war, deadly autonomous machines, and by a non-stop toxic rain. What few remnants of humanity that remain exist as “junkers”, scavengers scrounging in the ruins of society in search of food and supplies while evading the deadly machines that still stalk the land.

Planetarian’s story follows one such unnamed junker who makes a risky trip into a city’s ruins to search for supplies and finds himself unexpectedly entering a planetarium, where he is greeted by the facility’s robotic attendant Yumemi, designed to look like a young woman, and who seems to not only have no concept or understanding of the post-apocalyptic wasteland the Earth has become, but is still mindlessly engaged in her daily activities of welcoming non-existent guests to the planetarium, announcing presentation times, and extolling the wonders of her facility’s now run-down and malfunctioning features.

The junker and Yumemi are both pretty abrasive characters at the start of this game’s story. Yumemi’s mindless insistence on following her pointless scripts and the junker’s irritation and dismissiveness toward her make both of these characters difficult to like. However, to Planetarian’s credit, the story gradually finds the humanity in both of these characters. And in a way, that seems in keeping with the themes of this game’s story as a whole, of finding something good worth holding on to in a bleak and depressing world.

As Visual Novel games go, Planetarian is rigidly linear, with no player choice, and will take an estimated 3-4 hours to complete, depending on the player’s reading speed. The spoken dialogue is voiced in Japanese, apparently fairly well, and backed by a subdued instrumental soundtrack to focus the emotions on Yumemi’s innocence and the overall depressing situation. And the visuals have a decent style with static anime-style portrait images of Yumemi and detailed background shots.

Overall, I liked Planetarian, though I didn’t love it. As I said, both of the game’s characters are pretty unlikeable at the start, Yumemi’s repetition can get really annoying, and while the lack of players choice isn’t a deal-breaker here, combining that lack of choice with the aforementioned repetition and unlikeable characters becomes frustrating when you want them to do something different. However, if character-focused stories and post-apocalyptic stories appeal to you, Planetarian may be worth a try.

tl;dr – Planetarian is a linear Visual Novel with no player choice set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where a scavenger happens upon a human-like robot with a mindless fixation on her planetarium and no conception of the terrible state of the outside world. The characters take a bit of time to warm up to, but once you do this becomes a nice story that blends both charm and despair into something bittersweet. This won’t be for everyone, but those who find the game’s blend of ideas interesting might want to give it a try.

Grade: B-

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Jamie and His Cats, Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Johannes, Francis Obst, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Jared Wark, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}