exactly that

Sounds like my experience in Tales of Maj'Eyal. You'd mentally fall asleep fighting Rodents of Atypical Size, and then suddenly a blood cultist or Elite shows up and ruins your day in 3 turns or less.

Yeah, that was my biggest issue with it, felt like if I did one thing now I was likely to break three others later with no way to fix it. Player choices should usually have clear consequences, and where the devs insist on implementing unintended consequences, there must be ways to fix things when you get there, so have some additional steps and/or higher difficulty to get the desired outcome, but not block it off.
Thought so to for a while, but eventually learned it is the right one for groups of weak enemies or when you want to break out of a few moderately-powered ones crowding you.

About equipment upgrades though, having any at all was rather a concession made to the fact that it's a game I'd say, as a witcher would normally rely on his steel and silver swords and that's about it, unless perhaps getting something legendary, which only makes sense towards the end.

Should've thought of this one from the start: Earthworm Jim 2

It just needs 2 or so additional standard platforming levels, and about 2 fewer puppy bounce and top-down jet scooter levels.
I suppose the final level was also a bit of a let down, especially compared to the 1st game. Come to think of it, I'm not sure "just short of great" actually applies. It feels far inferior to the 1st game in almost every way, and I think it is because they just implemented whatever came out of their brainstorming / acid taking sessions, instead of sifting through it and trying to make a fun game.

I didn't have any problems reading the text in Ultima games, ujnless the text is in that special runic alphabet rather than normal English (Roman) letters, an issue that first appeared in Ultima 5. (Notably, the Sextant uses runes in that game IIRC, making it less useful (in addition to being night only), and on completion of the shrine quests, there's some important text that is entirely in runes.)

then they are not games, why not just watch an anime or read manga or just a book?

There is ongoing academic debate between ludology vs narratology approaches to defining a game. If you consider gameplay to be more important in games, you're taking the ludology approach. I consider story to be more important in games, so I take the narratology approach. Both camps will never resolve which approach has more precedent.

Regardless, VNs are games under a narratology approach. You may not think they're games, but to some academics and those who believe games can and do have narratives, they are. In most of them, you make interactive choices of some of your own volition that affect the flow of the story and the endings you get. 1. Animes usually come after VNs are made. And oftentimes, the anime don't have enough episodes to cover the contents of the entire VN. Best example is the Umineko anime, which cut a lot of its content and has its own original ending. Also, watching anime is a lot slower in terms of exchanging info compared to reading, which matters a lot if the VN is text dense. And as I've said, some VNs have many branching plotlines that are limited in how this is shown through anime (without time travel or parallel universes being involved).

2. You have to rely on scanlations until a publisher picks it up. And with print media, there are sometimes issues with being no longer in print, affecting supply. Also, there's no sound through the characters' voices or the background music. Umineko is another egregious example here. Also, the English publisher, Yen Press, opted not to use coloured text in its print, which is incredibly important to the narrative. And since it's out of print, we're looking at $100 USD / episode for eight episodes. So that's $800 USD to own it physically, which is inaccessible for many audiences.

3. Most Japanese books are not usually translated into English. Some VNs are not published in books. Therefore, it is difficult to get that same media in traditional book format. Books also don't have pictures, sprites, music, and usually don't have dialogue choices.

It's not a matter of unreadability, but rather that parsing is slowed down due to how absurdly frilly it is. I'm a speed reader, and Gothic/elegant typefaces vanished for a reason. If I can't tell if it's a G, an O, or an R without having to look for the context, that's a problem.