Characters...

So I just got finished playing the update of a game called Grove. It's a simple little game about a dragon explorer in a world filled with monsters who will try and rape him. It's not meant to be taken seriously, as can easily be told, but it got me to thinking about characters. Specifically, do people really care about them? Because in that game the main character is supposed to silent, you can really tell that because whoever is writing the story is making it painfully obvious that he doesn't want the character to talk, since, I guess the titular character is supposed to a self-insert, but this got me to thinking about something.

How can you have a self-insert into a game, if the character isn't allowed to have feedback on his/her/their circumstances.

In Grove's case, he constantly gets sexually harassed by just about everything in the game, watches as it happens to others, saves people from such fates, and yet he has no honest opinion about...anything that happens to him. And this became a glaring issue for me, because as the game continued on, I found myself not caring about him or his circumstances, so much so that after the game had concluded, I was left feeling completely devoid of emotion regarding everything going on, and there was one reason for that...

Lack of character feedback.

I understand that in some games, the journey is supposed to be the story, and characters are just vehicles to get you from one set piece to another, but there's no story in Grove, just a bunch of happenings that you can easily avoid with the right gear, since the game is battle heavy. So without a story, there's nothing to break up the monotony of the gameplay besides the lewd scenes.

You're not really interested in any other characters, because there really aren't any. There's a team of three of other explores, but they don't really have a much in the way of character, outside of certain set pieces that are scripted. There's no feeling of care having been put into them to make them memorable, like how Lucca was in Chrono Trigger, or how Yuffie was in FF7, they just feel like props that the developers dressed up and then put down into the game so as to break up the monotony of going from place to place. This is even further highlighted by the fact that...Grove doesn't have a personal stake in anything.

I know that silent characters are supposed to

 be vehicles, but Link from LoZ at least is prophesized to do the things that he does, so you could say that he's fulfilling his Manifest Destiny. Mario at least seems rather thrilled to fight against Bowser and save Peace in Super Mario RPG, even working with the big turtle dragon to save her from a fake wedding. 

But for Grove...there's nothing.

I get that stoicism is a character trait, but it really works to the detriment of the story, as you're trying to fill in blanks for a personality with very little to work with. To make this fact even more concrete, one of the developers asked about how much everyone in the Discord server liked one of the members of the aforementioned three man group...and outside of me, who pointed out a basic lack of character in the character, and someone else who admitted they liked the idea of a big, soft person to adore (not even acknowledging the character itself, just what they liked about the idea of them) nobody else had anything else to really say.

And it was at that point that I realized that, more than a handful of furry visual novels, or just video games in general, don't really have characters set in them, they have templates that move around from set piece to set piece, and I'm wondering if this is just what people want in games? Because we're now a decade into furry games being an actual genre, so to speak, and I'm trying to actually remember three games that I've played with characters that I can actually say that I liked and remember fondly. 

And sadly, all I can do is draw a blank. 

Grove Game: https://grovedev.itch.io/groverpgnsfw

So here's the question, is better to have a character that's a blank slate to play with, or one with their individual character traits?