is a Japanese post-apocalyptic visual novel developed by Key, a brand of Visual Arts whose previous works include Kanon and Air. It was released over the Internet on November 29, 2004, for Windows, and is rated for all ages. The game was later ported to the PlayStation 2 (PS2), PlayStation Portable and Nintendo Switch, as well as mobile devices. The story centers on a man who comes across a malfunctioning robot in a dead city. The man, known simply as "the junker", stays with this robot for a time and attempts to fix the projector of the planetarium where the story takes place.
Key defines Planetarian as a "kinetic novel", since it offers no choices or alternate endings. Instead, the reader proceeds through the story solely linearly. The story is written by Yūichi Suzumoto and character design is produced by Eeji Komatsu. The game's soundtrack was composed and arranged by Key's signature composers Magome Togoshi and Shinji Orito.
A light novel of short stories set in the world of Planetarian was released in April 2006, and three audio dramas have also been produced. David Production produced a five-episode original net animation series and an anime film in 2016. Planetarian story, artwork and music have been praised, and the PS2 version ranked first for console games in terms of satisfaction in 2007.
Gameplay
Planetarian is a post-apocalyptic visual novel in which the player assumes the role of the junker. Unlike traditional visual novels, no choices are given to the player in Planetarian to advance the story, and there is only one possible ending; this is what Key referred to as a kinetic novel. The player can choose when to advance to the next dialogue screen or put the game on auto play. In this respect, the player does not play the game as if it were a video game, but plays it rather more like one would play a music track on a CD or play a DVD film. During gameplay, the player can choose to hide the text from view and go back to any previous lines. The game can be saved at any point in any of the five save slots available, and a load option is available where the player can load any of the automatically saved chapter markers, or choose to load any of the manually saved games.
By length of story, Planetarian is the shortest of Key's games. Excluding the opening and ending sequences, there are 16 parts to the story; the first half is set within the planetarium while the latter half is set outside in the ruined city where the planetarium resides. The novel takes four hours and forty minutes to complete on auto play.The stated time assumes that the default auto play speed is used, which allots 0.07 seconds per character with a minimum time of 0.3 seconds. This reflects about the average time it takes the text to be read aloud at a normal pace. Quick readers can easily go through the entire novel in less than half of this stated time. After the game has been completed at least once, two new options appear on the title screen. The first is a feature that allows the player to view twenty images of CG artwork observed in the game. The second option allows the player to listen to eight of the nine music tracks featured in the game.
Plot
Setting The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world. It is said that due to the depletion of natural resources, overpopulation, and the failure of the Space Exploration Project, humanity has virtually eradicated itself through biological and nuclear warfare, turning a once prosperous civilization into complete ruin, cast in darkness and poisoned by constant rain from nuclear fallout. One military invasion in the past was at Mare Nectaris. The bloodshed continues 30 years after the war in a dystopic world via automated war machines, which kill anyone trespassing into their territory. Of the remaining humans, there are those known as "junkers" who go around scavenging for anything in order to survive; the protagonist in the story is one.
The main location where most of the story takes place is the fictional Flowercrest Department Store in a derelict city. It is based on the real Matsubishi Department Store of Hamamatsu, Shizuoka in Japan, although the planetarium on the rooftop is fictitious. The onset of the story takes place within the planetarium which is where the protagonist first meets Yumemi. The most prominent feature in the room when a show is not taking place is the large black planetarium projector called "Miss Jena",Jena is a manufacturing city in Germany, specializing in precision machinery, pharmaceuticals, optics and photographic equipment, and is home to the Zeiss optics plant. In 1926, the world's first modern planetarium was built by the Zeiss company in the Damenviertel district of the town. The projector in Planetarian is based on the Zeiss Universal Mark II optical planetarium projector. which is placed on a stage in front of the seats. The planetarium has electricity when the protagonist arrives, but only for a short time. Once a year, for 168 hours, electricity in the planetarium is operational, but the projector is broken. The rest of the floors in the department store are in ruins; mold and rats run rampant.
Characters
The protagonist is a nameless soldier living the life of a "junker"—scavenging useful items among ruined cities to survive. He enters a derelict city searching for undamaged goods and finds an abandoned planetarium on the roof of a building he first thinks is a military facility. There, he meets Yumemi Hoshino, a gynoid designed to look like a young girl who annoys him greatly due to her constant talking. The protagonist has a tough personality that comes from trying to survive in a dystopic world. He carries a grenade launcher with him and covers himself with a waterproof coat to protect his skin from the toxic rain. For drinking water, his canteen has a water purifier that can purify the rain. He is constantly searching for rarer substances such as cigarettes and alcohol which can be sold at high prices.
Yumemi is a kindhearted but extremely talkative gynoid attendant of an abandoned planetarium; she is designed to look like a young girl. Yumemi is slightly damaged and completely unaware of the changes that have occurred in the past 30 years, as none of the facilities and databases that she connects to exist anymore. Therefore, she treats the protagonist like a regular guest by calling him , speaks of the world as it was before the war, and fails to understand any information he tells her, other than things related to her job at the planetarium. The name "Hoshino Yumemi" itself is a pun, and can be interpreted as . Yumemi is the only character shown to the audience of the game.
Yumemi is very adamant about protecting humans and is happiest when she is helping those she serves. When she is unable to help someone, she gets terribly worried that she is incapable of offering assistance and must instead indirectly help a customer by directing him or her to someone who can. Protecting humans is her top priority and will even ignore previous orders to make sure no human is harmed when in her care.
Story While dodging detection from war machines in a ruined city, the protagonist enters a building with a dome on the roof to search for usable supplies. Once inside the dome, he meets Yumemi, who offers to show him a special commemorative projection especially reserved for the 2,500,000th customer, although he is in fact the 2,497,290th customer. Despite his aggravation with her, he agrees to attend her show. However, the projector device, "Miss Jena", has broken down and is in need of repair. After he repairs it, Yumemi starts the show, presenting a projection of the starry sky, something that cannot be seen from the surface because of the polluted skies. The power goes out in the midst of the show, but Yumemi proceeds through the rest of the event with no visuals at the request of the protagonist.
Afterward, both of them leave the planetarium, as Yumemi insists on escorting him back to his vehicle outside the city walls. The protagonist plans to transport Yumemi out of the city after her battery runs out and find a way to reactivate her. A machine the protagonist calls a fiddler crab, due to its design, is guarding the entrance to the city in which he came from, and he devises a plan to destroy it armed with only a grenade launcher. After his initial plan fails and he is forced to face the machine front on, Yumemi tries to protect the protagonist, but is blown in half by the war machine's machine guns.
Yumemi spends her emergency battery life replaying her pre-war memories to the protagonist using a tiny holographic projector on her ear. When the video fades, she reveals that she had known that the planetarium would never have more customers during the 30 years she was alone, despite her apparent infinite optimism up to this point. In her final moment as she "dies" in front of him, Yumemi ejects the memory card from her artificial brain for his safekeeping. Touched and completely shaken by the loss of the beautiful world she left in his mind, he throws away his gun and puts the memory card in his coat, before wandering off with a broken leg as the fallen war machine's automated backup units are closing in on the scene.
Development Planetarian is Key's fourth visual novel, and had a small staff of three main people that did the majority of the work for the game's first release. Unlike previous Key titles, Planetarians art director position was given to Eeji Komatsu instead of Itaru Hinoue who had held the position for the three previous games. Komatsu was chosen not only because of his specialty in depicting mechanics and robots, but also because he could represent short scenes which touch on a robot's existence to reproduce a person's ideals. Furthermore, Key was not short on staff at the time, and was not forced to outsource the artwork of Planetarian. Jun Maeda, Key's main scenario writer and project planner, was left out of the project, and Yūichi Suzumoto was given the position of planning and scenario. The music, excluding a single piece composed by Shinji Orito, was arranged or composed entirely by Magome Togoshi, one of Key's signature composers. Planetarian was the first game under the brand name KineticNovel to be described by the term "kinetic novel".
In the original version, Yumemi is only voiced during the beginning and ending scenes, while other characters are not voiced. When Planetarian was released for Windows PCs on CD-ROM, Yumemi had full voice acting. The PlayStation 2 (PS2) port offers full voice acting for the entire cast. Other changes to the PS2 version include a higher resolution for the computer graphics and an extended soundtrack. All other later versions contained full voice acting.
Music
The visual novel has one main theme song, the ending theme sung by Mell of I've Sound, an arrangement of the folk song by Kenji Miyazawa. The Planetarian Original Soundtrack was released on August 11, 2006, at Comiket 70 by Key Sounds Label; it was later re-released on December 28, 2006. The soundtrack contains one disc with twelve tracks composed and produced by Magome Togoshi, and Shinji Orito; themes originally composed by Charles Crozat Converse and Miyazawa were remixed on the soundtrack. All of the tracks were arranged by Togoshi, except "Human Warrior" which was arranged by Orito. and are rearrangements of the hymn "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" by Converse, and their titles reflect this as well: "Hoshi no Sekai" refers to the Japanese version of the hymn named "Hoshinoyo", and "Itsukushimi Fukaki" is the Japanese translation of the hymn's original title.
Release history