Ghosts: I agree with the OP that ghosts are too common. I mean, come on, they pop up everywhere and every sim that dies becomes one by default. Totally lame. There isn't even a Fear/Scared emotion for a proper reaction to ghosts popping up everywhere or a ghostbuster job to help us clean up the excess ghost population. Overused and underdone, that's TS4's ghosts in a nutshell.
Aliens: Aliens are O.K. and they're fun for what they are. I just wish that They would add the appearance linking function from the vampires' dark forms to the alien disguises. I can't tell you how annoying it is to have to recreate your alien sim's basic appearance in their human disguise each and every time. No, I do not want my alien to be all fit and good-looking, then have an ugly pear-man body and freaky-looking random face in his human form, thanks. I like my aliens' human disguises to share their basic build and features, just being a humanized version of that. I can do that well enough with my vampires' forms, but I still have to manually fuss with my aliens...that, or try to use cheats to copy their features properly, which is too round-about and over-complicated to do all the time. Also, I'd like to choose which aliens forgo their disguise entirely and which ones hide, thank you very much. I like having some aliens just like, " 'Sup, I'm an alien. Problems?" and others who are trying to be incognito, and I want my out aliens to be out even when I'm not playing them.
Vampires: The best done of the lot so far, and I hope that when (and it had better be a "when") they do werewolves, they take inspiration from what they did with vampires for them. My only big peeve with vampires in TS4 is that when you switch households, if you have vampires that have learned any of the advanced movement powers (Move as a Bat, Teleport as Mist, Vampiric Run), the game automatically turns on the option for them to always move that way. It totally ruins things with vampires that you want to be hiding their true nature when the game does that. Plus, it's disrespectful to player agency. If I wanted my vampires to always use their advanced movement powers to get around, I'd set them to do it myself. I hate that the game fiddles with my settings when I switch households. It does that with my computer security settings too, because every time I go from one household to another I always have to reset the lockout on each of my sims' personal computers since I'll often come back to the game putting the wrong sims in the wrong rooms on their roommates computers!! ...But, that last part about the computers is a whole other rant entirely...I also really wish that a vampire hunter could actually kill vampires instead of just splashing a potion on them and taking their powers away. That's pretty lame. Then, you cheat-kill the vampire and they come back straight away as a flippin' ghost...UGH!!
Spellcasters: They're...alright. Just alright. I wanted to be able to cause a lot more mayhem with them, to be honest. The elemental spells aren't deadly enough (they just make other sims a bit uncomfortable for a little while when you cast them on them), duels are fun, the Magic Realm is a cool concept but the Magic HQ could have been much better designed and built and the shopping district and greenhouse are both letdowns, and learning magic is just kind of grindy with little real fun to be had unless you actually build a whole storyline around the grind (and, yes, grinding in a game CAN be fun in and of itself if the leveling mechanics are designed well enough, but the skill grinding in ROM is sub-par...like the later stages of gaining vampire skill levels, but if that later stage grind started at Fledgling instead of Master...). The practical skills are good, but I wish that the mischief and untamed spells had more oomph to them in terms of their effects and potential for chaos, destruction, and hilarity.
Mermaids: First strike against them is that they had the nerve to put out merfolk before werewolves. Second strike is that they didn't even get a skill tree like vampires and casters. I mean, I could have forgiven them putting out merfolk before werewolves if they at least had been given a proper skill tree like vampires got, but they just had to add insult to injury by putting out merfolk with a bunch of pre-picked skills like aliens instead of a proper skill tree like vampires. Useless fish...
In summary, supernatural sims have been hit-or-miss here, with ghosts and merfolk being the biggest misses, aliens and casters being in the middle, and vampires still being the biggest hit of the bunch. Something tells me that whoever is calling the shots on occults this time around loves aliens and vampires but has no love for any other occult elements of this series whatsoever or even the real life folklore attached to them.
