Playlog: Planetarian HD

Planetarian Is a visual novel from 2004 developed by Key. A developer I know for their involvement in other “classic” VNs like Clannad, Kanon, and Air. I first learned of them from their original anime, Angel Beats! which was animated by P.A. Works and got its own visual novel in 2015.

Planetarian is a linear visual novel about a cynical and gruff male POV character who meets a cheerful, yet airheaded robot girl in a dead city after a worldwide apocalypse at a somehow partially-functioning planetarium. It’s playing in a lot of trope spaces that were common in Japanese media in the 2000’s. Male characters that go through their stories constantly complaining and being “annoyed” by the more cheerful characters around them, but humoring those characters and doing things for them in spite of that apparent dislike and annoyance.

It’s this style of character that particularly irks me in stories of this nature. We are told, over and over again from the perspective character that the one other person he’s interacting with, a robot named Hoshino Yumemi, is stupid, stubborn, annoying, and repetitive. He has no reason at all to stick around other than empathy, something he claims to lack for these artificial beings. The perspective character gives us plenty of reasons why he should leave the Planetarium behind, with no reason for him to stay, yet stay he does.

That said, I can’t help but find myself enjoying the story in spite of that. The characters are consistent in their writing, and humans are contradictory creatures by nature. In a way, the two very different worlds colliding is the interesting part of this. The gruff scrapper and the bubbly slice of life girl make an odd pairing, but they do grow on me.

I’m about two hours in now, in chapter 9 of I think 10 (plus epilogue?) It’s interesting to me that this came out in the same year as Clannad, which has a surprisingly similar POV character. Okizaki Tomoya similarly seems to be just coasting through life when we meet him, cynical and disillusioned. Where he and the Junker differ, however, is how their character changes over time. Not necessarily in the direction they go, but rather the speed with which they go that way. Tomoya quickly opens up to whichever love interest you guide him towards. Clannad is a bigger game, with more text and a branching story including a “golden route” where you must complete other routes to unlock a true ending. I think I prefer the linear style of Planetarian, but I do now want to give Clannad another shot.

For more thoughts, tune in to next week’s Community Report where we’re going to be talking VN turkey with Rinoa.