Is gameplay really the most important part of a game?

There is a vocal group of gamers out there on the internet that believes that gameplay should always be the most important aspect of a game and I’m wondering whether that’s true or not. So I decided to take a look and analyze the top rated games of the generation and see if I could agree with them or not.

Using this generation alone some of the highest rated and loved games of the generation (by metacritic) are as follows

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - 97

Persona 5 - 93

Uncharted 4 - 93

MGS 5 - 93

Witcher 3 - 92

Bloodborne - 92

Having played all these (most to completion) I can say that only two of these have a gameplay focus which are Bloodborne and MGS5. MGS5 has been critically and commercially successful but hasn’t universally loved by the MGS fanbase, in fact, many believe that the direction Kojima and his team took the franchise in was the wrong one. They believed that forgoing all the crazy story elements and focus of the earlier games in favour of more freedom and gameplay options ended up hurting MGS5 as a whole and I’d be inclined to agree.

On the other hand, Bloodborne has very little narrative and almost the entire story is told through visuals and item descriptions. This was one of the best parts of Bloodborne for me, but its real appeal was its gameplay. It was bloody, brutal and super satisfying and there are very few games that can replicate the feeling of beating a boss in that.

Zelda focuses on exploration, puzzles and discover. These appeal to longtime fans of the franchise and to newcomers as well. Although many had complaints with some of the gameplay elements (weapon durability) and quality of the dungeons, most gamers loved the game despite these pitfalls. Personally for me, I got bored playing this game because the combat wasn’t very engaging to me and there was very little narrative at all. I am not one of those people who absolutely loves exploration and I don’t like puzzles either, so I was left in the dark here.

Persona, Uncharted and Witcher are all narrative heavy games that don’t have particularly good or bad gameplay (although W3 leans into the below average territory). The gameplay is serviceable in all the games but what really sets them apart for most people is their presentation, characters, stories and music. However, I will say while find Persona and Witcher to have a good enough balance of gameplay and narrative, uncharted 4 has too much narrative compared to gameplay. Many sections of the game are basically you climbing random areas either talking to someone or yourself and most of it isn’t very interesting or engaging. So ultimately a lack of gameplay (combat in this case) bogged this game down for me.

I mostly play competitive multiplayer games, rpgs and action games so I’m definitely more of an oddball here where I hold different games to different standards depending on what genre they are and what they set out to do. So ultimately, I came to the most obvious conclusion that it simply depends. Some games need deeper gameplay to carry them through (it is pretty much required for competitive games ) and others have the narrative and production values to hold the audience’s attention despite mediocre or average gameplay.

So what kind of gamer are you guys? Narrative focused? Gameplay focused? Exploration focused? Up for anything good? If you guys like this and more me to do more upvote, resteem or whatever. I'll be mostly focused on the gaming side here and may start doing more individual game reviews.