/jp/ - Otaku Culture

I just finished planetarian HD.

Prior to reading this, I knew it only as "the short Key VN," "something to do with robots," "one of the first VNs to be translated into English," "a beginner Japanese VN," and "a nakige." I am here to tell you that the people who view this as "short Key robot nakige" are missing the forest for the trees, and that no one should read this in Japanese early on in their studies. You also probably should not read this work in translation.

I would feel very comfortable stating that this work is primarily about and related to philosophy. The VN broadly explored themes and ideas related to the organization of human society, such as the co-dependence of humans on each other and our relationships with technology and nature, using "robots" and a "planetarium" as motifs. Delving deeper, one could make arguments that this novel abstractly touches on themes as deep as "mental health" and "time travel", but a surface-level reading would never lead you to these ideas. Most of the philosophical content of this novel was buried deep beneath the lines, and require quite a bit of thought to dig up.

The text was shockingly high quality; if you told me Gen Urobuchi ghostwrote this I would 100% believe you. The author utilizes a very broad vocabulary, often writes words using the most difficult kanji he can just to fuck over beginners at Japanese I guess (see: 壜、曳く, things of this nature), and incorporates frequent use of Baldr Sky-esque furigana. Unfortunately, from what I can tell the text was most likely mangled beyond recognition in translation. The VNDB screenshots seem to indicate that the translators rendered お客様 as "Mr. Customer", which is a translation so bizarre that it could only be delivered by a chimpanzee wearing a human suit, or otherwise someone who has absolutely no idea what they are doing whatsoever. I have no faith that the text could have been accurately conveyed, given that it is such a high-level text and the translators can't even get the simple parts right.

This work went far beyond my expectations both in terms of thematic content and textual quality. Of course it also hit the feels, but probably every review of this work has elaborated on that, so I will leave that to them. I therefore highly recommend planetarian to all readers with advanced Japanese skills. 8/10.