Any character can Punch for various points of damage, but only Punch and Special use of SP. Choosing Defend causes your character to put her hands over her face; she takes less damage from a hit that way. Somehow. Choosing Item lets you pick something good from your inventory of treats. You start the game with a Mandarin orange, which restores a few SP and HP. The good thing is that your SP increments by one at the end of each turn, so if you do nothing but Punch the enemy, you'll never run out of SP, and can save it to use on your Specials.

Choosing Flee means you'll try to escape the battle, but all characters must Flee for it to work. Choosing Special will allow the character to use her unique ability. Your ability to start with, once you've accessed it, is Hypnotize, which puts the affected enemy to sleep for a few turns. Hitting the enemy wakes it up and lets it attack again. Special attacks eat up more SP than Punches do, and you only have a limited amount of SP, so managing your Specials is important. Other characters have different Specials: healing, lightning, etc.

The end of each battle gives the characters experience points that go toward their leveling up; each new level grants one point to use in upgrading the various attributes of your character. You can upgrade your Special, which can either strengthen it or cause it to affect more enemies, depending on the Special. All in all, standard RPG fare.

But as mentioned, what makes Science Girls! interesting are the bits between battles, during which the characters interact. There's a great sense of humor at work here, and a surprisingly natural back-and-forth between characters. There's also an odd almost-mechanic where the characters will bicker with one another about science, and who knows what. For example, Jennifer decides that the aliens you're fighting aren't plants, even though they look like plants. You disagree, and she asks you if you know what it is that differentiates plants from mammals. A series of responses pops up, and you have to choose the correct answer. After playing through this a couple of times and choosing different answers, it turns out the different choices do engender different responses from the other characters, but none of that affects actual gameplay. But you can learn a little science!

There's not a lot more to tell about Science Girls!, actually. In the preferences, you can enable or disable having your character yell something in Japanese when she attacks. You can choose three different difficulty settings -- elementary, standard, graduate -- and each of these alters the essential gameplay to be easier or harder. In combat, if there are more than three characters, the front row attacks, but the back row doesn't; you can switch out the active members at any time. Basically, for $9.99, you get a serviceable, casual RPG with some fun dialogue. There are worse purchases to make.