I disagree.
There are next to no mandatory fight in the game. If you dislike fights, then avoid them. It will, by the way, make the following fights more significant and more difficult.
If you do all the fights, it becomes tedious because you become overlevelled and level scaling is probably too effective.
The most tedious fights I can think of are the ones you are hinted to avoid (frozen immaculates in hiberheim, goblin passage to the mines, with the invisibility potion, spider eggs in luculla desert).
As for story, the little zones story is rich up until the Dark Forest (Hunter Egde is awesome).
I think the tedium resides, as Daelus put it, in the inventory management, and waiting for some very slow animations in combat. Even when I am out of combat, casting spell is insanely slow (the cast command takes a while to launch, the animation is slow, the post animation is very slow, I can start running centuries after casting). Register how much time we've seen each animation and reduce its time progressively. It makes me think of Final Fantasy Games with unskippable summonings
