No, it's not, especially if the encounters and combat are well designed. It's exactly the same as in action games, poor encounter design leades to frequent repetition and spamming of strategy X, good encounter design doesn't. Persona 5 and Shadowrun Returns and Divinity: Original Sin and Shadow Hearts: From the new world all have very different turn based battle systems and are all very good at encounter design and avoiding excessive repetition, meanwhile Tales of Berseria is fairly bad at encounter design so the actual depth in the combat system is wasted because you can steamroll almost all the fights with the exact same strategy (time 1 dodge, spam x till out of SP, activate devil arm thing, spam X until special move, re-activate devil arm thing, repeat.)

That's most of what the AI was in the first place. Video game AI (as far as combat preformance) really has little need to go much beyond that.

You don't need to account for every situation, you need a good baseline set of actions and responses for general combat (ie is sufficient for 70 or 80% of the time,) and then you balance the game in such a way as to allow player input to make up for the AI in places where it isn't coping well. That's the strategy Xenoblade used, and is literally the entire point of the chain system. It resets cooldowns specifically to prevent their AI routines interfering with the players needs in the situations where the player actually needs them to do something specific.

I don't know how much experience you have with systems like the gambit system, but in FF12 it's quite easy to set up gambits that will work just fine 70% of the time. Even in the much more complicated Dragon Age Origins it's not a particularly difficult task. Most of it is just targeting priority, evading/blocking dangerous AOEs and using the core skills for the class (taunt foe targeting healer, for example.)

I guess it would help to define what I mean by inherently fun/boring: If you can design an entire game around that aspect, it's inherently fun. How long could you play a game that booted up into a turn based battle against an endless stream of opponents with no context? I'd imagine most people would grow bored quite quickly. However there are games where booting up and going straight to combat is almost the entire concept: Fighters, Shooters, Character Action, etc.

Traditional Turn Based systems are inherently boring to the majority of gamers, because it's literally picking commands from a window, no different than a vending machine at the most basic level. That's not to say turn based combat can't be great, it's just that designing around that weakness to cover it up is what makes games like Persona 5 so great.

Persona 5 has a lot of interactivity in its combat menu compared to say Bravely Default. On top of that, new mechanics are steadily being added through social links, frequently changing the formula in little ways, all while your senses are bombarded with weaponized coolness. Persona 5 also goes out of its way to create content outside of battle, because if you do long stretches of battle in the game, you will get repetition fatigue. Those well crafted side adventures, in Persona 5, are excellent palette cleansers, and the fact they can also add to the combat is a stroke of freaking genius.

Also I'm well aware AI that works in 70-80% of the the situations available is perfectly acceptable, but I was illustrating that gambits are better because they can far more easily account for 100% of the situations players will come across in any given time due to their simple nature and the ease with which they can be changed. This extra control and reliability also increases the ceiling for encounters in terms of complexity and difficulty as well.

"I'd imagine" isn't an argument, and raw consensus (even if you did have it, which there is no evidence of) doesn't make anything inherently fun or not fun. That's not what the word inherently means.

In reality it depends entirely on the game and the person. For one, if it was an action game with that kind of setup I wouldn't play it for very long at all because without context it's gonna stop being entertaining relatively quickly. For 2 you're aware that MTG and Hearthstone are 2 of the most popular games in the world? You know games like Pokemon continue to sell 30 million units with every release despite the combat having been almost exactly the same in every single game?

Yeah, you're just describing a good difficulty curve. If an action game gives you all the tools right off the bat and never introduces anything new or gives players a break from the combat to do other things, it'll get boring and repetitive for a lot of people. That has nothing to do with the game being turnbased or action. That's why even non-stop action games where the story doesn't matter still tend to have stories. A little context and even small breaks from the combat goes a very long way to keeping players engaged.

You're moving the goalposts is what you're doing. I never claimed more typical companion AI isn't inferior to a well done gambit system in terms of functionality, I claimed that implementing gambits in no way reduced the work necessary for the programmers. Like 10 short, basic if-then strings will get you through most content even in complex games like Dragon Age Orgins, and there is no need for AI more complex than that if the game is properly balanced, which is the approach basically everyone takes in games like this. In fact it actually increases work, because for such a system to work proprely they have to give the player more options than they would need to implement themselves with a different system.

If you think the Switch version models look unique, I have dozens of anime titles to sell to you.