Apr 26, 2026
Seeing a serious sci-fi anime with such a high score, I thought I had stumbled upon a gem. Perhaps it was precisely because I set my expectations so high that the disappointment hit so hard.
I think Planetes delivers on the science fiction aspect; it’s clear there’s a great deal of research behind it, and the setting it presents is not only believable, but also plausible.
The way gravity affects the characters, the design of the habitats, stations, ships, the suits... it’s amazing. Choosing a near-future setting makes it so the viewer doesn’t have to 'buy into' anything they’re told—there’s no exotic technology involved. The only thing
...
we’d need right now to have a world like Planetes is time and financial investment.
I think what makes the series less enjoyable are the characters. Many of them feel caricatured, completely uninteresting—but if they were merely bland, it wouldn’t be such a big issue; the problem is that they’re downright unbearable.
This is especially true of the two main characters, who, while not one-dimensional and showing some degree of development, have personalities so irritating that it becomes impossible to empathize with them. To be fair, the series does have some interesting characters, but they’re neither explored in depth nor given much screen time.
Another issue I have with the series is its length; it spends too many episodes on things that are of no interest whatsoever—adding nothing, neither helping you understand the characters better nor moving the story forward in any meaningful way.
While watching it, there were several moments when I considered dropping it. Unlike other anime where you eagerly look forward to the next episode, with Planetes I often felt a sense of 'obligation' every time I sat down to watch it.
In the final stretch, things do get more interesting, and it makes you wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better to take that direction earlier—or simply cut the series down to 18 episodes.
I’ve given it a 6 to be fair to its technical aspects, but had I known what I was getting into, it’s an anime I wouldn’t have watched.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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