I for one have been playing openmw non stop. Being able to replay morrowind on a brand new modern engine has completely enthralled me. The graphical enhancements you can add are superb, volumetric clouds and fogs keep the same aesthetic of the alien world Morrowind inhabits while also adding some much needed visual flare.
Also the gameplay still holds up…mostly! Finding your quests is an experience in itself. I’m getting terribly used to quest markers and maps that tell me where to go. Morrowind says fuck you “Your quest is by the old rickety bridge south of town besides the river. Good luck” no markers just exploration.
The game is not for everyone but everyone should try it.
Most of the problems with the plot are tangental to true spoilers, so luckily, it’s not hard to talk around it. That said, P4 does have a fantastic twist, as it’s a murder mystery game for most of it and finding the identity of the killer is a huge part of it. So, if you’ve avoided spoilers so far, I’d try your best to keep it that way.
All of the Persona games are little poor in the way many Japanese games are with gender, sexuality, et al. But P4 is especially bad about it with one of its main characters very gender bendy and basically their lesson in the game is that, they’ll never pass as anything but their birth assigned gender for their character arc. There’s a decent amount of fat jokes that are in poor taste. There’s homophobic humor wrung out of another main character’s non-gender conforming interests and passions. There’s another main character that has a non-traditional career, but they are pushed toward something that’s more gender appropriate. Because a lot of the game revolves around overcoming your “shadow-self” and pushing out bad thoughts, it gets kind of dicey for character arcs. Basically the message being, there are certain core things about yourself you can never change and you need to accept that; bur rather than liberating, it’s stifling.
All that said, if you can get past that stuff, it’s still a reasonably good story with what some people consider the best cast of characters in the series. I certainly wouldn’t say avoid it, but know you’re going into a plot with social ideas that are flat out regressive, especially by today’s standards.
spoiler
That’s a subject of controversial discussion but can be seen in that way. I personally think the interpretation of “Male(-perceived) people are subject to less discrimination at many things in live, so I’ll do the old school trope of the person who acts male to fit in” is more likely what the intended story portrayal was - an old school writing trope.
Nevertheless the solution presented by the game is a simple “don’t do that.”, which is weak even for a lib game. Persona 4 doesn’t care what the characters’ complaints are, it just wants them to stop complaining. You’re gender non-conforming/bothered by sexism? Have you tried not being bothered? You’re gay or bisexual? Have you tried not showing attraction to people of your own gender? You don’t wanna inherit your parents’ inn/be an idol anymore? Have you tried not complaining and doing what you must?
Persona 4 was actually my first megaten game, but it’s probably the worst written one, in spite of the actual quality of the plot - the message it tries to convey drags it down in enjoyability a lot.
This really hits it with the over coming the shadow-self thing. There could be a really liberating message there. Like “society has certain expectations of you because of x gender identity or y career path, but that sucks and you should be true to yourself even in the face of that pressure” but instead it’s more “society has a certain expectations of you and have you thought maybe you should just suck it up and accept that?”