Looking back on gacha & characterization

I made this project as a kind of spoof gacha with the idea people could submit their characters and I'd add them. BTrain graciously submitted some of his characters over. 

The structure of this game is very simple. You acquire in game currency through playing the comedic story mode which can in turn be used to acquire new characters. I think that this core concept is quite good. It's fun to unlock new characters and it introduces a great deal of variability to playthroughs. However, I've found that this architecture doesn't let people really interact with or get to know the characters. I don't know much about BTrain's submitted characters other than their 1-2 lines. This is not an issue with the material BTrain submitted, but rather with my design of the structure of this game. In its current form, there isn't really anything for a player to get attached to the characters (except the banger art, in the case of BTrain's submissions).

I thought this structure was OK, because having only played Fire Emblem Heroes (FEH) at the time, I thought that was standard for gacha games and a consequence of the genre. Having now briefly played Uma Musume and Sword of Convallaria, I realized that it's simply that FEH sucks. People get attached and emotionally invested in their anime horsegirls. On the other hand, FEH's structure, which this project somewhat inherited, doesn't allow any meaningful characterization that would allow players to grow attached to the characters they unlock.

So I've been trying to think over a better structure that would allow different characters to actually matter. I would like to one day revisit the concept of "SRPG Studio Project" with new design elements that would allow players to get to know their characters better.