"Why don't you come to the planetarium? The beautiful twinkling of eternity that will never fade. All the stars in the sky are waiting for you."

Clocking in at just under 5 hours if you leave auto-read on, planetarian is quite short for a visual novel, but manages to tug quite hard at your heartstrings considering its length. Those of you who have read Key visual novels in the past or watched anime adaptations of them (Clannad, Kanon, Angel Beats, etc.) will know what to expect from planetarian in the emotions department. Those of you that haven't done so, fair warning:

Be prepared to cry.

Key's works are famous for their tear-jerking properties, and planetarian is no exception.

Getting back to the cold, analytical side of things, planetarian was made back in 2004 - 11 years ago, as of this time of writing. Unfortunately, its age shows a little bit. It's restricted to a 4:3 presentation, so you'll get black bars on the sides of your monitor if you try to go fullscreen.
Unless I didn't dig hard enough, you can't manually set the resolution either, which is annoying, but only that; the resolution that's set is just fine - it's probably whatever resolution the original graphics were meant to appear in - and I never had a need to change the resolution for anything during my run. Thankfully, none of the aforementioned graphical issues really detract from the enjoyment of planetarian, as they're all minor annoyances at best, and understandable ones at that.

The soundtrack is good, though I felt a couple tracks early on were too short considering how long they played. The title theme and "Perfectly Human" in particular stuck out to me as memorable tracks. I can't claim to understand Japanese aside from a few common words and phrases, and the voice acting is entirely in Japanese, so I can't comment on the voice acting much.

I notice a lot of people praise the translation. I can't read the original script, but the translated one felt a little bit stilted to me, as if the translation was purely mechanical, paying no attention to how an ordinary English speaker would normally phrase things. Again, nothing major, just a nitpick.

All in all, planetarian was a short, sweet, touching visual novel that I heartily recommend to anyone, regardless of prior visual novel experience.

But bring tissues.
You'll be using them, trust me.