The original game that Emi got reincarnated in, has such strange gameplay.
It seems to start like a standart Otome game with a VN gameplay, only to change halfway into what seems like a Dragon Quest like RPG
Yes, it seems very weird.
Makes you imagine how it would really be.
Maybe it has smaller questilines amidst the otome game-focused start, where you train your characters a bit with smaller quests (mostly done by Emi here, and Pina did not bother wondering why they were not available).
Said smaller quests would be used to buy equipment and items, which could be used to woo the "capture targets" which would then join you up in quests and even improve their stats depending on their relationship with the heroine.
Judging from how Remilia once mentioned Pina would not be able to meed people without leaving for the Main Quest, which she could not do before the world was in danger (and Remilia is stopping the issues
before they got big enough her help is needed), I am assuming the "capture targets" are not
just in the school, but would increase in number as the quest-based story progressed.
Kinda like in Radiata Stories, a PS2 game (and only PS2 as far as I know) where at first you can recruit mostly humans (most non-human characters are hard to find), then later you can find some more non-humans, but after a point of the story where it splits between the human and the non-human sides you can end up losing all human characters but unlock a lot of non-human ones to recruit instead. And there are over 150 possible characters if you combine both paths...