Planetarian | Visual Novel Review

the world of planetarian

Planetarian

After the world has already ended, humanity struggles for survival. In Planetarian, our main character wanders on his own into a Sacrophogus city, a city that’s been dead since the apocalypse. He is a junker and is just heading in there to see if he can find anything of value. What he didn’t expect, was to run into a really cute robot girl working at a planetarium.

Planetarian is a short visual novel created by Key, who you might know from Kanon, Air, and Clannad. As you can come to expect from Key, this is a pretty sad story but an emotional journey well worth taking. 

The protagonist of the story only knows a painful, dark, selfish world where anything and anyone could kill him. Despite seeing a non-threatening cute girl, his immediate impulse is to aim his rocket launcher at her. In this world, that is the only way someone can survive. He starts off as a bitter man but as time goes on,  the girl starts to show him there is light in this world. This is a short story so I wouldn’t want to spoil much, but there are some very beautiful moments in this game that help to give hope when all hope was lost.

closing remarks

Planetarian Stars

The artwork is really beautiful for what you get. Yumemi is absolutely adorable, and despite her chatterbox ways, you can’t help but fall in love with her. She is precious and must be protected! The whole story took about 5 hours to read through, and I felt good about the whole experience. This game did have me in tears so have a tissue box ready. If you want to get Planetarian, it’s available on Steam here. For another post-apocalyptic visual novel review, check out our thoughts on the more light-hearted KARAKARA.

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