Moving away from the recent digital pickups with a lesser-known title and one that was developed by Chinese developer MuYan Studio.
Vanity Fair: The Pursuit is an FMV game, aka Full-Motion Video, like the ones that you would get back in the day but for the modern audiences. It's almost like playing
428: Shibuya Scramble but the scenes were in motion than static. Anyway, the reason why I wanted to play this one is because it's pretty much a Chinese drama series disguised as a video game and I don't often see C-Dramas available to watch legally.
The story of
Vanity Fair is all about a young filmmaker who starts out rough and has to work his way through various hurdles to become a successful director whilst also getting involved with a few individuals whether it would be revenge, or trying to resolve an ordeal that doesn't get them into serious trouble. The story can lead into different outcomes, thanks to the visual novel style structure where one choice you make could end to a bad ending.
The game has a lot of bad endings and even endings that aren't necessarily bad but not the ideal route. For example you could decide to sleep with a girl, get them pregnant, reject being a father, give up your career as a filmmaker to become a bolt maker and then when the girl and young boy appears you decide 'nah I'm good back to making bolts' and watch the others react with a surprise Pikachu expression. That is literally one of many endings this game has and it's pretty entertaining.
The story is divided across six chapters and a prologue, with various options to go back and forth to see different outcomes and be able to skip scenes if you have witnessed them already, which allows for easier replayability if you're trying to see different routes and endings. The timeline structure is a bit messy because you're using the D-Pad to go back and forth whereas I would have preferred a model similar to a world map to make exploration of the timeline easier. It's fine for the most part but you can easily get lost with the navigation. Another major issue is unfortunately the localisation of the game.
The English translation for the most part was fine, but there were noticeable grammatical errors and when there's profile segments appear on screen, the spoken dialogue during that moment isn't translated. The subtitles are also fairly large and because they're white with no borders it can make the reading experience a bit challenging, which is made worse by the speed that which the sentences appear which I think is due to the sentences that appear are single line only.
Despite the issues, I had a good time with
Vanity Fair: The Pursuit. As a game it's not perfect but as a Chinese drama series it's a solid experience, with a cast that definitely looked like they were having a great time with the various endings and scenarios and the story was honestly pretty unpredictable from my perspective. The true ending was good too. It took me 5 hours to finish the story and get the remaining trophies for the Platinum, which isn't a 100% completion but a good majority of the scenes experienced.
