Yeah, I haven't had a hard time with any of the battles yet, and I haven't even leveled up that much. I think I'm only about level 6. All you have to do really is make good use of the Gambit system. Sometimes you might have to adjust it during the battle, which should keep you from being lazy.
For example, when I was fighting the Flan, I had Fran's attack Gambit set to Fire, but she runs out of MP pretty quickly, so when that happened I went back and changed it to Attack so that she would still be able to act.