can't we have both?

yes its called lost oddyssey lol

story is alot more necessary then good gameplay its a rpg.u have to tell the story of the person.role playing game get it

Says it all for me.  I'll play a game with a bad story if the gameplay is super addicting... but if the opposite is true... eh.

Really good music is more important then story for me too because the music keeps repeating.

Then again... i do have trouble getting through FF12 despite loving it's gameplay... and it's music being good.  (though underpar for a FF game.)

Yeah it's a role playing GAME.  "Role playing" is a modifier for the noun GAME.  If you didn't want the game part, you could just role play at home, dressed up as a knight wandering around saying "Hast thou a quest?" to your friends and family all day.  Actually, we should all start answering the phone like that.

Both are essential. If the game has a fantastic story but a horrible battle system, you'll get tired of it in no time. If the battle system is great but the story sucks you'll either lose interest halfway through the game or crawl to the finish and forget the game forever as soon as you're done with it

RPGs need both story and gameplay to be good

Gameplay, Temple of Elemental Evil has perhaps the best gameplay I've encountered in an RPG but the story is practically nonexistant.
There are also games who do both equally well, such as the Icewind Dale games and the legendary Baldur's Gate games (on PC, not the console shaite).

The best combo of story and gameplay I have ever come across, however, is a game that has aged well and that every RPG fan should play; Betrayal at Krondor, that game is epic in every sense of the word and I don't think I'm lying if I say I've played through it 20 times since it came out.

The first 4-5 Ultima games were also extremely good on both accounts (gameplay and story)! That sweet combo is hard to come by nowadays, especially modern WRPG's are quite shallow in both gameplay and story (like Oblivion and Mass Effect, the latter has a very good story but flat gameplay imo) and RPG's have been poisoned into something they're not; mere tech demo's of fresh or updated graphics engines which spend more time advertising their HDR effects than the game's real content (or lack thereof).

RPG's are slowly dying for me, I hope someone comes in and saves the concept of RPG's very soon (and MMO's are also ruining the scene for good single player RPG's).

I'd say story.  The most memorable RPG's I've ever played always kept me hooked on to see what would happen next,  Gameplay of most RPG's is usually pretty repetetive except for the boss battles.

a game can suk (see third person shooter)..but a role playing needs to have a good story i play alot of games that suk and still have a good story(see operation darkness).

THere has to be a balance of both.

Rouge Galaxy: awesome gameplay to the extreme. That is how FFXII's battle system should have been. But then the story was god awful so it had to go back to the store :(

Star Ocean Till The End of Time: Story was good.....all the way to the twist ending >:( Then it turned to crap!!! Combat was the redeeming factor. Seeing as 2/3rds of the story was good and that the battle system was on point, i deemed this one a keeper.

Magna Carta: Epic, thought provoking story, god awful battle system. I tried my hardest to tolerate it but when I got to the point where I had ran out of Element Mana or whatever it was called that game was beyond playable. Don't forget the fact that the battle system plays out like Star Oceans except the other characters dont move while you do. It almost feels like the game was incomplete.

Radiata Stories: Terrible everything except art design.

Final Fantasy 7,8,9,10,11,12; Persona 3,4;Kingdom Hearts 1,2: well balanced games that never utterly disappointed me. These are keepers :)

ok forevercloud3000 if there was a rpg that had a good story but crap gameplay .and a rpg that had awesome gameplay but crap story which would u get?