Ultima IV had 8 party members at once, and it definitely made battles feel very slow when you had to cycle through giving all of them commands one at a time.
@dodec Oh yeah, there are definitely good reasons to have less than that. Suikoden's 6-member party worked pretty well, largely because the "auto" option was good and the battles were streamlined (multiple attacks happen at once, etc)
Yeah, they definitely learned how to make it work smoothly.
Also I just remembered the Final Fantasy Legend games, where you often had 4 main characters plus a fifth character in a rotating "guest" slot.
@dodec You can't control the guest character though, right?