I get the perspective but it didn't work for me at all. The developers didn't seem to have anything interesting to say about rebellion or thought as conditioned by social media. The themes didn't resonate with the dungeon arcs in interesting ways, and the characters didn't seem to develop beyond their initial states.
P4 was a mystery, and a reasonably good one. It was about trying to solve a mystery with friends, and so the character development in the early going when the overall plot was stalled paid off for me. The overarching connection between the different episodes and characters in P5 relied too much on a sophomoric ra ra fight the power thing that I found offputting. Mind you, I stopped after about 50 hours, so I'm willing to consider that something super interesting happened after that. I was just so burnt out on dungeon crawling broken up only by more dungeon crawling and spending time with irritating and poorly written characters.
I found the motivation and anger from the characters pretty reasonable, considering what they went through.
The rebellion aspect was also most of the time implemented well, Makoto for example. The difference how the characters awaken their Persona, in contrast to P4, shows the rebellion attitude of each of them. They all take action to do something, which is very important aspect of P5 themes, but that get obvious later in the game.
P4 wasn't a good mystery imo, because you actually do nothing important to solve the case for like 90% of the game. The conclusion is also arbitrary enough that it could've been someone else, without changing to much.
My problem with P4s story is that the major aspect, accepting the truth, and how the view of others influence someone, is completely underdevolped. The characters don't get enough time during the story, to show their struggles. Despite having dungeons based on the characters the game shows almost nothing of their problems.
This is especially oblivious in comparison to P5s 4.Dungeon, which shows how much potentiall ies in this premise.
P5 does in general it so much better, because it gives it characters enough time and don't shy away to show their suffering.
P4 uses the majority of its time for anime fluff like the camping trip or the hot springs.
P4 is a great game, my second favorite Persona after 5, but when it comes to story or themes it is pretty underwhelming in comparison to 5.
