If we are talking about a porn game, the art (visuals) will always come first, otherwise no one will want to play that game. Great gameplay cannot overcome bad art. Great art can overcome bad gameplay.
What exactly you mean by gameplay because gameplay can be anything and sometimes gameplay can be part of the story like simple example player choices so you can't define gameplay with 1 word, but I will say everything is important in the game.
Very true, I played many games with "bad" story but I don't know maybe the setting of the game or maybe the gameplay is what make me keep playing and enjoying this games, I didn't play many VN games so I can't judge but many of the games I played didn't have a good story, and the same thing can be said for art as well.
If you have bad gameplay and good art, you should ditch the gameplay.
I never said no story at all. Even then, it's possible make fun games that don't have any kind of story tied to them.
Gameplay is whatever you do to play the game. It is going to be different depending on the genre, of course.
Yes, people play video games to play them, but there always needs to be a 'reason'. Even something as simple as Super Mario had a reason. Street Fighter had a reason. Mass Effect had a reason. Regardless if the story/lore/aesthetic was as simple as 'Princess is in another castle' to saving the galaxy from evil, the reasons are what separates games that are meh to top tier to people.
The reason a story isn't so vital to a game's quality is for one reason, replay value. A story loses much of it's value after you've seen it once. A game however, can still be fun after you've played through it. Maybe it's an increase in difficulty, randomized aspects of gameplay, a different playstyle, or the triumph of defeating another player.
Or a story is the reason people keep coming back. Why do people keep going back to RPGs like Final Fantasy? Story. Minecraft is popular, but then I'll point to sports games needing story too. Why is FIFA or Madden so popular? It is not simply gameplay alone, it is the licensing. Take away Ronaldo and Tom Brady, replace them with Rinaldo and Tim Grady and two generic teams and see no one play it in comparison to the official licensing. That licensing equals a specific aesthetic rich in history that people are invested in. Take away the history then the people's investment disappears with it. I can point to Sega losing the NFL rights to their 2K series. If it was simply gameplay they would have continued on the series with generics but they didn't.
Alright then, let's see how gameplay can intrigue someone into playing a game post-completion vs how a story can do that.
