Vanity Fair: The Pursuit Review

You play as Lu Yuan, a young director who has yet to succeed. After failing yet again, he contemplates suicide and fortuitously meets a business manager who wants to get into movies. Unfortunately the business is actually run by a crime family. Lu Yuan signs on to make his dream movie. But, due to the criminal element, tragedy strikes and one of his oldest female friends is killed. Although the culprit is clear, they get away with it. You plot for revenge and the only way to pull it off is to ascend this crime family by doing some underhanded things. How far will you go for payback?

The overall story is great, with twists and deception. It features oodles of branching paths and spans 15+ years. Like a Choose-your-own adventure book from the 90s, a lot of choices lead to a premature ending. So there might be 10 endings in a chapter and only 1 unlocks the next chapter. Many endings result in death or failure (begging on the street). Some are actually positive though; two women have romantic conclusions in the opening chapters, which is unusual.

Unlike a lot of other dating sim games, you don’t get to the end and live happily ever after with whomever you choose. No, the full and final ending really only involves a relationship with one of the women, although admittedly this is done well and makes sense. There are some alternate endings, but they’re not quite as substantial.

While the branching paths are great, it can make for tedious completion. There are some logical choices that lead to the next stage (e.g. working out who gave you information), but also just as many that seem random. A few paths require high affection and this might mean you have to go back to previous chapters. So you almost have to brute force it, or hope to get lucky. It took about 3.6 hours first run and another 4 to see 98% of the scenes.

Video quality is decent. Unlike the newer dating FMVs, most scenes are third-person with main character Lu Yuan visible, but there is some first-person footage. Audio is sadly all ADR (automated dialogue replacement), so that subtracts a few points. Translation is mediocre, with overflowing text on screen, text that flashes off quickly, and the usual gender issues. Actors and actresses are good. Hemu’s actress was also in Director Simulator. Xiaomeng’s was in Half Billion: Love Choice. And Haiyue is probably the best of a very good cast. Ultimately, if you’re happy to navigate through a lot of branching paths in order to actually reach the end, Vanity Fair: The Pursuit is definitely worth playing.