Of the five, here's my take. As an overview, I don't like the trend of D&D and gaming culture shifting further and further into extremes, edgelords, and characters with whom it is impossible to identify. I like grounded characters, and in Forgotten Realms, I really like grounded characters moreso. Now I'm aware that ever since 3rd edition (and Pathfinder really did a lot of damage here), there has been a steady march into characters that resemble MMO's moreso than Tolkien inspired fantasy. That isn't the end of the world, as long as there is moderation. For every Drizzt, you need a dozen grounded characters of the classical races. So on and so forth. That's just my opinion of course, and I am well aware of how many people disagree with me. With that out of the way, here's my one or two sentence view of each character.
Lae'Zel is voiced well and seems like a decent representation of a Githyanki. I don't have a problem with Lae'Zel as a companion due to the direct tie into the opening sequence, it is perfectly well explained why there's a Githyanki wandering the material plane and joining you.
Shadowheart's name is terrible and made me groan until the first time I met her and I had the option of actually pointing out in-character that her name was weird, this won me over. Shadowheart manages (so far in the EA) to come across as a relatively believable evil cleric in the realms, having views that don't always revolve around carnage, chaos, and generally being a monster, which is a flaw of most western RPGs, including the classics.
Astarion is a pretty cliche pouty snob boy, but I feel he's performed well enough that it doesn't bother me much. In fact, the character sometimes wins me over despite my overall dislike of the entire design. We've already goth a Githyanki and Gale's deal, why did we also need a vampire spawn? Why did the vampire spawn also have to be an elf? This is a human character that was made into an elf, who never displays any elven qualities. It's added unnecessary templates onto a character.
Gale, and his aforementioned 'deal' are a lot of fun to me, and are quirky and original without being edgelordy and without me feeling as though the setting is losing its grounding. Gale seems like the most well done character concept, although his design, in appearance and voice choices is somewhat forgettable. Fortunately, his actual scenes are among the more memorable I can recall in western RPG's for a while.
Wyll has a lot of potential I think, but he's a bit more annoying than I thought he would be. He is definitely well grounded in the lore, and his opening quests are very low-stakes, and plunge into low level D&D, which is always the best form of D&D. I suspect he will become more endearing as the game goes on, with more exposure to his cocksure style.
I don't think we're going to see 1 of every class, as that'd be quite a large number of big personalities to develop and voice. Hoping that we get solid prototypical dwarf dwarf and halfling still. Though given what I've seen, we'll probably end up with a dwarf like Grimgnaw again.
