Planetarian: Chiisana Hoshi no Yume
AKA planetarian ~the reverie of a little planet~ was what I had in mind when I read the passage that got all this started. (note: all inline links like so from now on will be going to Wikipedia, unless otherwise noted). This is a "game" I had heard about last year, but never got around to trying out, mostly because at the time I believed it was a game, and didn't have the time for it.
A couple weeks ago, starting about 10 at night, I decided it was time. An inquisitive beefy over my shoulder questioned, "Is this porn?" While the answer was "no", it was not an unfounded curiosity: this is just one of two games by Key that do not include "adult content", and it isn't much exaggeration to say that a vast number of visual novels, especially of those known in the west, do. More thoughts on that at a later date, but at any rate, by American standards, this game is perfectly family-friendly. But American standards are rather poor at being standards, after all. But truly, more on that later.
While I knew it was a visual novel, what I didn't know is that it was more specifically a kinetic novel, a brand name which really just means you don't have to do anything. In summary, this computer game requires absolutely no input, other than reading the text. >>>woooosh>>> (that was the subtle blurring between literature and games zooming by there).
Ok, to be fair, it's pretty much reading a story, with voice and pictures added, but not every story is great literature. And whether this was truly great was something I've debated since.
But a little background is perhaps neccisary at this point, so to start at the beginning. Planetarian's claim to fame is that it makes grown men cry. Now, while grown men can cry all they want, what really makes it stand out is not only that, but it makes grown men admit to crying in masses on the internet. That's impressive. Discussions about it on online forums generally contain at some point statements such as, "If this game doesn't make you cry, you don't have a soul". So going in, this expectation, makes it that much harder to be emotionally affected by it. And perhaps that is the only reason that the actual audible sobbing could at least be postponed until I had left the room.
Now this is about to be a spoiler, technically, but really the ending can be seen coming in the first five minutes, so you're not missing much. She dies. Duh. By that point though, the worst is already over. I was not so much upset by that as by the end of perhaps what could be called part 1 (but wasn't. For anyone who knows, I am referring to the projection/presentation), in the middle of the story. And it is both nothing so dramatic as that, yet many times more impossible to watch with a steady face. Nor is it anything that can be explained in summary. In truth, I think part 2 was unnecessary, and I didn't expect the story to continue past the end of part 1, yet it did for over another hour, which only dragged out the conclusion that was so obviously coming. (The whole story, at the auto-speed I watched it, was about 3.5 hours, though at default speed I hear it's 4-5).
But there are two points I considered in wondering if this was truly great literature. Surely, if any writer wanted to study use of emotion, this is the perfect example. (There was some poor writing in it at places, but I am unsure how far to blame that on the game itself, and how much on the translators. While they all in all did an excellent job, (the end of this sentence is...) for a fansub group. Indeed, there is no official release of this game in English, rather the entire translation is a patch downloaded from the web). While manipulating emotion in itself is no great feat, unless we are ready to declare romance novels all great literature, Planetarian does it through such subtle methods that I still have no valid reasoning why I was so distraught by the end of part 1.
The other point is the absolutely perfect form given to character, tying in with the above point. There are only two characters in the entirety of the story, and one is "you", who has no voice, says very little, and frankly is hard enough to care about that he might as well not be considered. The other is a robot. And it is for a robot that people everywhere are so sad. While there are plenty of books and movies out there where robots turn out to be just like people, have feelings, and so are sympathetic characters, this is not one of them. Reverie (or Yumemi - now even fansubbers are renaming characters to sound English? Weird...) is in no way indistinguishable from a person. Read that line again: I'm saying she is very clearly not human. Except, of course, that it is a "she". Would the same story have worked with a male character, instead of a cute girl? Probably not. But even so. Her character is unbroken through 99% of the story, and in fact it is in the very scarce places where she appears to be acting human, clearly for the sake of sentimentality, that I find the story to be the weakest. But they are few.
And yet you don't notice this during the course of the game. It was not until I was over half way through that I realized it: she truly behaves as a preprogrammed machine would. Her responses to similar questions are identical down to the tone of voice every single time. She has absolutely no growth as a person from beginning to end, because she is not a person. And despite this, the reader is made to feel for her.
The feeling is perhaps equivilant to that of feeling sorry for an innocent child, who cannot understand the perilous world around them. (The world's been destroyed, BTW). But there, there is logic, some sort of parental instinct. In this case, I can only keep asking myself, why do I feel so bad for a machine? She is similarly pure and innocent, but there is little pretense that she can even see anything outside her programming, let alone ever understand it, or even be bothered by it.
Meanwhile there is a feeling of smallness throughout the story, further depressing things; watching two lone people, nearly the last remnants of humanity (or... well, you know) on the Earth, and feeling like here, in one small place out of the whole world, time has stopped. But it is not to last.
While this is not a solid conclusion reached, it is as far as I can think about it, which is no farther than I made it two weeks ago when I watched it. Yet in this thought is where I figured this must be considered literature, if it is to leave me with such unanswered questions about the essence and nature of emotion.
If anyone wants to play the game itself, there's only one place you need to go, http://planetarian.insani.org/, the home of the fansub group. Their site is absolutely amazing, detailing everything you need to do to get the game to work, right down to having translated screenshots of every step of buying the game from the Japanese site. It's only $10 to download legally, but of course there are torrents if you can't be bothered. To be honest, you'll want to get a torrent copy either way, because you'll need to copy something out of the CD image if you want to get the voiced version, which the purchase download lacks due to size. My personal experience, do install the game's font file, and of course Japanese language files if you haven't in Windows, but I didn't have to set it as my default/non-unicode language like some say.
