I have done two of these, my first two, which take about an hour each. My pro tips for getting through this process follow. It isn't bad; only the first time through is tricky.
Online Tools are a Must
Use the A5E Tools website instead of the book! This is also in the sidebar. You will save so much time flipping, and you can have multiple tabs open to reference everything.
Download the Pre-Gens
Download the pre-generated characters and use those as a guide! This site also has form-fillable character sheets that will save you a lot of time. Copy and paste as much as you can and type instead of writing; you will save a lot of time. Especially features & traits, copy and paste all of them.
Other Notes
Remember specialty skills! This tripped me up, especially when I saw the pre-gens having all these specialty skills, and I had no idea where they came from. This is a 2 + INT bonus (knowledge skill specialties only for the INT ones) total.
The supply max is STR, and 1 supply is food and water for 1 medium or small-sized creature per day. Give everyone 2 supplies to get going.
Use the pre-created equipment packages to start; this will also save you a lot of time shopping.
Compared to 5E Characters?
These characters are fantastic. This game sits between 5E and Pathfinder 2e in terms of complexity, so if you want more detail about your characters, you can have it all here. I created a wood elf druid who wanders the woods and is the new chief of a loosely organized tribe of wild elves. She had special abilities that helped her play that role, which was very cool. She is driven to help her tribe, and help them prosper and grow.
I also spun up a tiefling town guard (fighter) and focused her abilities on spotting hidden items, lie detection, and a combat style where she fights better alongside others and can take sudden advantage of opportunities. She is driven by excellence in her work and military achievements and someday hopes to lead armies to make the lands of the kingdom safe.
Both of them can get adventure and advancement opportunities from their backgrounds. The tribe could bring up a threat to my druid, and she would need to help them. The town could put together a raid to break up a thieves' guild and call on the help of my fighter to assist. If help is given and the mini-adventures work out, there could be assistance from both groups given to the characters for a while, such as aid, spells, supplies, information, or even soldiers to help in a special mission.
Advanced 5E is an excellent system if you want to build characters with mechanical benefits granted by their origins and backstories. I like that these characters play well with the world and do not feel apart from it, and the backgrounds matter and can pull in adventure opportunities, NPC interactions, and news of events in the world.
Replaces 5E Character Rules Entirely
This is the sticking point for a lot of 5E die-hard players. A5E does not really play well with traditional 5E character creation and is sort of its own 5E-based game. Inside this beautiful sandbox, you can do a lot of cool stuff. You just won't be pulling in 5E classes or third-party 5E classes all that well. You can fight 5E monsters, cast 5E spells, and have 5E adventures - just using the characters in A5E instead of the original 5E.
Me? This is cool; I like it. This is a fun system that ties characters to their backgrounds, origins, and the world tightly. With our 4E game, characters felt disconnected and like they "floated" into town with no connections. I have little original 5E experience, so I can't speak much to that. In A5E, I have this really cool character creation system that ties my characters to the sandbox I am playing in; the characters, as designed, have established connections to the world.
This is so cool. Since I dislike that floaty, disconnected, planar style 5E play and love set worlds and sandboxes, having a 5E system that ties characters to specific factions and places on the map feels really good. I have characters with mechanical ties to the world, with exciting sub-systems and widgets built into the classes that make them act cool and unique. My town guard fights differently than other fighters; she has unique combat techniques and fighting styles. She feels and plays differently from other fighters, the same for my druid.
Even Pathfinder 2e characters feel a little floaty by comparison. People who say this is an easier 5E version of Pathfinder 2e are missing the point. I designed characters that fit into the 4E Nerrath Nentir Vale sandbox, and they feel like they belong there. My Pathfinder 2e characters, by comparison, felt unique and mechanically excellent; but they still felt like generic, be-anywhere adventurers. They had that disconnected from the world feeling many OSR games have, like the random level one fighter who walks into a generic fantasy town.
Now I know why they completely replaced the 5E character creation system. You can't get this level of tight integration, world meshing, and mechanical backstory importance by just "modding" 5E. You might as well go the entire way, fix the broken parts, and overhaul the system so it is focused on characters and their place in the world equally.
There is something more to this game that many of the reviews and articles miss.
Pick a medium-sized sandbox and start creating characters for it, and you will realize there is something more here than a "fixed 5E" or a "5E version of Pathfinder 2e." Advanced 5E is going in a different direction than One D&D, and I like it.
If you want a grounded, sandbox-strong, background-oriented version of 5E, check out A5E.
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