This review contains spoilers
The starry sky now belongs to you.
At the time of writing this I am just about finished with the questions arc of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Hou. This game is probably going to wind up getting a gigantic write-up once I finish it - it should be towards the end of this month! - but I digress.
It's weird to think that Planetarian: The Reverie of a Little Planet is the first visual novel that I have completed, but that's mainly just due to how short of a vn it is. I believe this sort of plays into how efficient of a story it is, though.
The three things that really stuck out to me the most in Planetarian is Key's efficiency, world building, and themes. The writing here manages to pack a massive punch despite it being around a 4-5 hour visual novel. The world building here is quite impactful too, and I again want to emphasize how fucking impressive that is for how short of a game it is!!!!
I think thematically this game really stood out to me, in a way that maybe was not the overall point of the work but I don't really like to think in those terms; I view it as rather binary, and fiction - art in general, really - should not be approached like that. Even so, I am not going to focus on what one might consider the "overall point" of the game because I would much rather talk about what stuck out to me, personally.
In the current world of constantly developing artificial intelligence and a general fear of something out of our control destroying civilization, there's a gentle reminder in Planetarian that technology can be good! Maybe these things that the tech industry is constantly working on building will not destroy society after all, despite the same ones working on further development are the ones pushing that narrative. This visual novel pushes egalitarianism quite subtly at times, sometimes not so subtly, but in a very effective way.
Maybe it's not the scary robots that destroy us - maybe that mass-extermination is entirely internal. Just like it was, here.
At the time of writing this I am just about finished with the questions arc of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Hou. This game is probably going to wind up getting a gigantic write-up once I finish it - it should be towards the end of this month! - but I digress.
It's weird to think that Planetarian: The Reverie of a Little Planet is the first visual novel that I have completed, but that's mainly just due to how short of a vn it is. I believe this sort of plays into how efficient of a story it is, though.
The three things that really stuck out to me the most in Planetarian is Key's efficiency, world building, and themes. The writing here manages to pack a massive punch despite it being around a 4-5 hour visual novel. The world building here is quite impactful too, and I again want to emphasize how fucking impressive that is for how short of a game it is!!!!
I think thematically this game really stood out to me, in a way that maybe was not the overall point of the work but I don't really like to think in those terms; I view it as rather binary, and fiction - art in general, really - should not be approached like that. Even so, I am not going to focus on what one might consider the "overall point" of the game because I would much rather talk about what stuck out to me, personally.
In the current world of constantly developing artificial intelligence and a general fear of something out of our control destroying civilization, there's a gentle reminder in Planetarian that technology can be good! Maybe these things that the tech industry is constantly working on building will not destroy society after all, despite the same ones working on further development are the ones pushing that narrative. This visual novel pushes egalitarianism quite subtly at times, sometimes not so subtly, but in a very effective way.
Maybe it's not the scary robots that destroy us - maybe that mass-extermination is entirely internal. Just like it was, here.