I agree with you op. I actually completed the game to the very end and I disliked it. While you might see a few posts on here that say, oh you only played this far, you need to get further before it starts getting good, etc, it's just a line of bs similar to FF13's play 20 hours and it gets better. Once you get three people, the gameplay doesn't change at all. Even when using two people it plays similar to three people.
When you're playing as a single character it's best because it feels that you have more control over your character. Say an enemy uses a special skill and you want to avoid it, switch back to Oliver then switch to defend. But with all three characters, there's no telling who the enemy is going to attack so you can either use all out defend to defend with everyone and then have to use all out attack afterwards, or just suffer the damage and get the battle over with more quickly.
Now one thing I did see that you mention is that you can't avoid enemies because they run too fast. If you're talking about only in dungeons, then yeah, that's correct. The quests that you do have small rewards though, like allowing you to run faster on the world map, or your boat will move faster. So the ones on the world map are easy to dodge if you meant those as well.
There's a fix to the brain dead AI if you're interested in atleast playing the game through. What you should do is place a magic using monster that can heal in slot three, while melee monsters in slot one and two. Remove every single MP skill except healing spells and put them on do whatever you like. They won't waste your MP within a single battle and they'll actually attack and heal. They still keep cancelling out of their attacks after one hit gets off, so whoever you control will still do 80-90% of all the damage in every single battle, but they help a bit more. Though I'd recommend the blue penguin that you can get when you clear that one trial with the girl, if you got that one, it has good attack and healing magic. Keep its weakest spell on and healing spells when it gets them and it's beneficial if you get in a battle against enemies that are strong against physical attacks.
Here's my review if you want to see what I thought about it.
http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=170924&page=.
Also, try out White Knight Chronicles 2. Maybe since you don't praise Ni No Kuni just because everyone else does, you might like White Knight Chronicles 2 and not follow the crowd and bash it just because everyone else does also. The AI is still dumb as bricks and it's got a turn based system like Ni No Kuni, except there's actually decent gameplay rather than constantly mashing x to attack. Every enemy has a weakness to a type of attack, so as a melee character you'd want to hit the enemy with the correct slash, thrust, or bash attack. Same applies for magic, hit the enemy with their weakness. There's also a lot of attack tiers so more MP does a more powerful attack, bunch of support buffs and debuffs, AoE attacks, and then points that you can save and use up for combo attacks or certain skills. Think of it as a turn based version of Phantasy Star Online.
No need to buy new though as the online is no longer available. You can still do quests in the game and increase your guild rank, but the servers are offline so the whole MMO-lite aspect of the game is gone except for you and your NPCs.
