About the 4/6 party dilemma, the problem is that they would need to have bigger battles with more enemies to compensate, and people are complaining a lot about the duration of the fights already.
The battles would go much faster if the AI didn't like to take upwards of a minute deciding to actually do nothing. If they fix that alone things will be much better.
As for the 'origin' characters. I'm not that big of a fan, honestly. I don't want to play their characters and their stories. I want to make my own character with the story I create for him throughout the game through my actions/choices. I wish they would spend less time making a special storyline for all of 'their' characters and just make the story for your character, and by extension the entire party, bigger and better. As others have noted having every character in the party with this huge secret story is kind of too much. Isn't it enough that you're a bunch of hapless suckers who were all trapped together?
