Escaping/Fleeing Battle

There are some common misconceptions about what happens when you want to abandon a fight and run away before it’s finished. How does it work? What options are there? And are there repercussions?

There are two routes you can use to leave a battle:

Option	How It Works
Escape	This command is available to every party member. When their turn comes up in battle, press to view an additional menu, and select the Escape command. This command will only remove that one specific party member from the battle, but as long as one of your party members gets away, you won’t see a “Game Over” screen if you run into an enemy that is too powerful.
Flee	This is a Thief specific ability. If you pair it with the First Strike auto-ability, a Thief gets to act first at the beginning of a battle, and instead of having to have all three characters manually “Escape” from the fight, Flee applies to all three as soon as it’s used.

Drawbacks

There is one drawback and negative aspect to be aware of when it comes to leaving a battle before it’s finished. Using either Escape or Flee will reduce the amount of damage dealt by an attack called “Finale,” which you can use by equipping the The End Garment Grid. The calculation for damage on this ability is:

Finale: (all previous steps) + 99999 [do not escape from battle with a character using Finale]

To explain it more simply, Finale normally adds a flat 99,999 damage on top of whatever the attack would have done anyway, which is what makes it the go-to option for dealing heavy damage in a single hit (such as for the Overkill achievement/trophy). That bonus is tied to having a clean escape/flee record. Once a character has escaped or fled from even one battle in the current playthrough, they lose it, and Finale falls back to ordinary damage based on her Strength stat. So running away is not quite the consequence-free option it appears to be. The counter is tracked per character rather than for the whole party, and it resets if you start a New Game+.