planetarian - the reverie of a little planet

One of the first games I completed for my Thanksgiving challenge (which I’ve been working on a couple days now, despite only posting here just now), it’s taken me about 4 years to get around to playing this SteamGifts win, and I really wish I had not waited so long. Despite not being the biggest fan of anime-style / Japanese visual novels, this was actually one of the good ones in my opinion. It doesn’t go in for all of the trope-y stuff. On the contrary, tells a very moving story with two interesting characters.

One thing I really liked was how well-written and natural the interactions between the protagonist (don’t think we ever got his name other than “Mr. Customer”) and Yumimi are. She’s obviously super-sweet and cutesy, but it didn’t come across as forced or out of place like I find in some anime or anime-style games. I guess part of it was that there were not the jarring switches of tone and/or characterization that are often done for humor’s sake in anime these days (and to a lesser extent fiction in general). The humor here was very understated, but that made the characters likable to me, and their relationship seem genuine.

I don’t want to say too much about the ending to spoil it for anyone, but I did like how it was left uncertain with a bit of hope. But that hope was within the context of a bleak world… it wasn’t quite the overly cheery “hope conquers all and makes it all better” kind of message some stories give.