As you walk around the various areas of the game, you will come upon some enemies bent on your destruction. When a battle has been initiated, you will shift to the battle screen:

Combat is divided into rounds. At the beginning of each round, you can choose to "Fight", "Autobattle", or "Run Away". Choose "Fight" to choose how your characters battle the enemies, "Autobattle" to have the computer choose your characters' actions for you, or "Run Away" to have your characters run away from the enemies. Battle continues until either 1) the enemies have no HP left, in which case you win, 2) all of the characters in your group have no HP left, in which case you lose, 3) you run away, or 4) the enemies run away.

If you win the battle, your characters will gain experience points. As characters gain experience, they will increase their level. When a character levels up, his or her stats increase, and he or she may even gain new abilities! If you lose combat, the game is over. If it looks like you are going to lose, and you still have at least one character with HP left, you may want to run away. Beware though, there are some fights, such as boss battles, that you can't run away from.

If you choose "Fight", you will then tell your characters what to do. Each character has the option of Attacking, Defending, using an Item, or using a Special Skill. Each character has a different set of Tech Skills. For example, Trevor has "Jock stuff", and Sage has "Drugs".

When you select a character's Tech Skills in battle, a sub menu will come up showing you all of the Tech Skills that character has learned so far. Tech Skills can do various things, such as healing a character who is low on HP, temporarily boosting a character's stats, removing bad Status Effects from your characters, or giving enemies bad Status Effects. Some Tech Skills are powerful attacks too!

However, you cannot use Tech Skills all of the time. All Tech Skills have a cost in MP. Each time a character uses a Tech Skill, that character's MP will decrease by the cost of the Tech Skill. If a character does not have enough MP to meet the cost of a Tech Skill, that Tech Skill cannot be used until the character regains enough MP to cover the cost. MP can be regained by using certain Items, or by sleeping in your room. Below is a sample battle screen. See the numbers below the picture to identify everything.

1. Active Character - The green bar around a character's name shows the character
you are using to perform an action.

2. Characters in Your Party - This is where you can see which characters are
participating in the fight.

3. Status Conditions of Your Party - This area shows the Status Conditions of your
characters. In the above picture, all of the characters are "Normal".
Sometimes an enemy's attack will give a character a bad Status
Effect, such as Sleep, or Poison.

4. Characters' HP - The number on the left is the current HP for a character, and the
number on the right is the maximum HP for that character.

5. Characters' MP - This shows each character's current MP.

6. Menu Cursor - The green bars show which Battle Command is highlighted.

7. Battle Menu - This shows all of the Battle Commands that the Active Character can
use. A character can only use one Battle Command each round.

8. Enemies - The enemies you are fighting.