If your game's story is more important than the gameplay, just write a book.
I like this comment. A lot of people say this from the player's perspective - "for story I would read a book" - but it's not nearly as common to think of it this way, from the developer's perspective. I think that this way is much more meaningful. The player-oriented approach is a simple statement with no room for growth; it just is what it is. Your comment, on the other hand, is a question. It's an invitation to thought. That's a really, really important distinction that I think hasn't gotten the attention it deserves in this thread.
As a creator (assuming artistic intent and not just wanting to make money), it's always necessary to ask questions about your work. Just as a poet considers the merits of choosing one word over another, just as a director ponders what the lighting and cinematography are bringing to his work, every creator has to make choices about how to best express their vision and intentions. The very first step in that process, for every creator since the beginning of time, is the choice of medium.
As a player, there is nothing wrong with enjoying stories that are delivered through imperfect shells. There is no fault in the user. But as a creator, it is absolutely a fault if your choices - choice of medium included - lead to your story falling short of what it could have been.
If a director said "the camera and scene are less important than the story", if a novelist said "the style and word choice are less important than the story", or if a musician said "the instrumentals and vocals are less important than the story" - I'll just say that I'd be worried, and that I would be quite surprised if their works met their full potential with those kinds of thoughts behind them.
I feel like you can't really classify VNs as video games.
I think this is an interesting point, too. It's quite a bold statement to say that they're entirely different mediums, but they definitely do stretch the limits of what we consider genres, given the huge fundamental differences in how they construct their narratives.
I think as it stands, video games have a few standardized story shells. (Though of course there are many games which blur these lines, and that's fantastic.)
- Kinetic novels. Basic VNs with no real input, where pressing A or left-clicking is the same as turning a page. When They Cry and Narcissu are solid examples. VNs with extremely limited interaction, such as the occasional A or B choice, are much closer to this category than the next one, at least in my mind.
- Adventure games. Often paired with VNs because of the focus on text, but significantly different in that the input required to advance the text is frequent and requires real thought. I would personally put Ace Attorney, Danganronpa, and some other titles that people tend to think of as VNs in this category instead.
- Cutscene-driven games. The player gives significant input for a while, then stops for a while. This is the largest category of games these days. Kingdom Hearts and The Last of Us are big-name examples.
- "Always-on" games. There are some titles in which significant input never ceases. Some of them are more or less removed from real stories (like Tetris), while others have a significant narrative focus. Games of the latter type often have exploration or individuality as significant parts of their narrative. Examples would be Rogue, Minecraft, or Portal.
Note that in none of these cases does "story" ever necessarily stop happening. Even in a cutscene-driven game, the gameplay segments are usually a significant contributing factor in forming the game's narrative. Still, because this is an interactive medium, I think it's useful to order thinking around the presence that interaction ("gameplay") has throughout the experience.
To tie this into the other bit, I believe that it is important not only for a creator to consider which medium best suits their ideas, but to also think about the genre. If they truly put little to no emphasis on gameplay, then it might be that they want a kinetic novel, whereas if they have strong feelings about a few light mechanics, they might want an adventure game, and so on. I can think of some titles that might have been significantly better with a different narrative structure.
As an aside, because of this line of thinking, I don't see games like the Zero Escape series as examples where story outweighs gameplay. This is because the creators made a conscious choice to fall between the adventure and cutscene-driven styles, and the rationale for that choice can be clearly understood within the context of playing the games and discovering their stories.
Personally, I get a very strong sense from those games that they were not designed in pieces, with a divide between gameplay and story, but rather as one cohesive whole. If I absolutely had to choose which I thought they valued more, I would probably choose gameplay, because both games' stories rely on a central conceit that is thoroughly and deeply rooted in their nature as games.
