Thanks a lot for your feedback! To be perfectly honest I agree with all of it. When I imagined the game, I wanted to assign a specific button to each character (that's how I envisioned the game being played with a controller, hence the blue (X on a Xbox controller) and green (A) characters), but while implementing it I thought that mapping the spot made more sense because it was mimicking the placement of the keys on the keyboard (that's why characters are on the right of the screen, so 1 can be on the left). I also agree that taking away control is not great, but I will use the jammer's favourite excuse: I didn't have time to change that.
I think I'm going to start fresh because the code is a mess, and use different assets, but I'm definitely going to expend on this idea. I have a list of maybe 10 characters I want to implement :D
Follow me if you're interested, I'll be sure to post updates here, and thanks again for that great feedback!