Im not sure what all was written cause I only read the first to comments but BOTH are important! You may have some "interesting characters" to you, but if theyre not doing amazing things in the story people are going to stop playing. Character development and story go hand in hand. Im not sure how you made so many characters without developing a story around them? I would suggest writing the story and seeing where the characters fall into play and what events you can dream up for them to all meet. Please dont pick characters over story, the story should create the characters.

Both are very important as one is incomplete without the other that's my point of view. However story is the main part to keep you rooted to the game.

Character development IS story. Plot is a recording of how the development takes place. Plot IS story. The are BOTH different ends of looking at the exact same thing.

Let's say you have a cowardly ex-knight, and by the end of the story he becomes a bold savior who saves the kingdom. You have certain key events in your head--key events that develop the character; plot points, so to speak. Plot is the sequence of events which bring out the change in character that is meaningful to the audience.

Let's say in the inciting incident an evil wizard takes over the knight's village, but the knight is too cowardly to act. Enter rival, the bold, brave (albeit arrogant) knight from across the kingdom, who saves the village and sweeps our hero's love interest off her feet. Our hero feels utter jealousy, but also self-hatred, because he knows it's his own fault because he was too cowardly. To make matters worst, his love interest is also his best friend, we'll say. And as wedding preparations are going on, he feels him self boiling inside, and ends up suicidal. Drunk, he goes to his love interest, and makes a heartfelt confession that doesn't go so well. The next day he just leaves the village, never to return--the pain is too much, and he wants to run away from the consequences of it all.

In plot point 2, he reaches a small campy town with a dusty, dingy inn. Inside is a very rowdy crowd, and he keeps to himself. He tries to figure out where he should go next. He can't figure anything out. He's lost and confused. In the end he ends up stark drunk, and is about to jump off a ravine, when a scamp from the bar holds him back. Furious, he swings at the little guy and misses, and ends up collapsing and blacking out. When he wakes up he find out he's in a slave caravan with the scamp. After a bit of bonding and befriending each other, he decides his purpose is to take care of the boy--something about the boy touches him; something related to backstory. Eventually what happens is one day the boy messes up something, and the masters start torturing him. From somewhere deep inside he finds rage and strength and saves the boy and frees all the slaves. They all run off in different directions, and, boy in hand, the knight escapes from the wild dogs chasing them through the forest. When they escape, and the boy is asleep, the knight is just surprised at his actions and strength. He stays up till midnight thinking about it all, and then finally falls asleep. Cue flashback to days of knighthood, when he was still brave, and hint at the underlying core of his cowardice.

...

And the plot points keep progressing his development as a character, from inert and cowardly, to focused and brave. By the end of it, he shall return strong, and slay the army of the undead, and save the kingdom from evil, and face his own greatest inner fears, and return to his love interest and face the consequences, and outdo his rival, who, for irony's sake, becomes cowardly and inert because of his arrogance--perhaps even the same mistake that humiliated our hero in his young days of knighthood and turned him to a coward in the first place.

But the point is, good plot if full of character development, and character development tells you what to do next in plot. It's not one or the other: it's both. They're the same thing viewed from different angles.

Any character is a story in itself, which is for some (hopefully good) reasons involved in the actual plot. How do you even differentiate between the two (in the storytelling context)? If you can tell right away where the "character" part ends and "plot" part begins, something is wrong with the whole thing. Usually it means that the character has no real reasons or motives to do what he/she does. Which means that both are bad, or more accurately: the combination is bad.

As for the cliche and "boring" plots - the one thing that people tend to forget is that cliche works. If you're trying to create something original just for the sake of being original, it will most likely be a failure.

Plots (and characters, for that matter) regarded as "cliche" today are actually those that have been filtered out and proven to cause the most powerful emotional response from the recipient. And I mean filtered over centuries, even millenia of human history and artistic creation (starting with the Illiad, for example). There is no reason why you should be running away from them.

What makes the real difference is in details, not the grand picture.

I wouldn't be so sure... Shadow of the Colossus had not much character development but a compelling story.