This implies that one is more valuable to another in an overall storytelling experience. It's a false dichotomy.
If your "graphics" (I think the word you're looking for is
aesthetics) hurt my eyes, I don't care how good the story is, I'll hate playing it. On the other hand, if you have a story-based game,
and the story is garbage, again, I'll probably hate playing it.
Games are about entertainment. You can use them as a medium to tell a good story with intricate themes, sure, but you can also use them to give me a sandbox to
run over grandmas with explore. Take Elite Dangerous: I enjoy this game. It harkens back to days in Freelancer and other such space sim titles for me. It is a giant,
400 billion solar system sandbox. The plot? "The empire, alliance, and federation hate each other." That's it. There is no plot, it's just a premise. No overarching series of events beyond those arbitrarily made for fun or decided upon by the community. The graphics though?
They make this game dammit. Sure, you could have made this in 2D Dwarf Fortress/Rogue-like graphical style. It would have been terrible though. Part of what makes this game fun to play is the visual spectacle of having 400 billion stars rendered at completely realistic 1:1 scaling: If I drop in by a super-massive star,
it is a super-massive star. If I drop nearby a black hole, time and space itself start
ripping apart at the seams while I try to cautiously navigate around it. If I'm fighting in an asteroid field, I am ducking and weaving through
tens of thousands of space rocks. There is no real story in this game beyond what you make of it yourself, and that's part of what makes it great: No linear story that I'm forced to play. Just me, and 400 billion stars, and the other players to occasionally blow out of the sky or fly with.
Then, you have a game like Dragon Age 2. Where it's entirely story-based and has more characters than Elite Dangerous does. (Namely because ED doesn't
have any characters whatsoever.) Yet Dragon Age 2 was torture for me to play: The story was
utterly retarded. Meanwhile, ED is fun to play, because there is no story to get in my way.
So... Yeah. People answering with "always story", um, no, not always story. If you want better stories, go read books, or even just literature in general. That's what it's made for, that is how it entertains you: Through its stories. Yet I guarantee you,
Captain Underpants and others like it ain't no Aristotle of storytelling, yet they were fun to read for the sheer
novelty of it all.