FFXII's battle system is what you make of it, really. You can effectively play the game in a turn based manner, or you can let it play automatically after setting up gambits to suit one's personal tastes. I myself typically pick one character (usually Basch) to control manually whilst setting up Ashe and Balthier to perform automatically.

You can also access certain high level enemies during the early/mid-game for quite an interesting challenge.