Initializing characters in a visual novel game
Have you considered a data-driven approach? This would involve making a file format and having a file that contains the information for each character. You could then add or remove characters at will by simply updating the data file. You could make a routine which looks for a particular file or takes a path to a file and simply reads the data from it and creates characters as it reads them from the file. The file could be in any format that you find easy to work with - XML, JSON, INI, whatever.