LET'S PLAY UPDATES (JUNE 2023)

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Side Notes
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Total War
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It's amazingly easy to cheese Rome: Total War and it's expansion Barbarian Invasion using diplomats on the lowest setting. This is because if the AI has at least four territories under it's control it's quite happy to trade it's land for large sums of cash over several turns. The problem with this is you can easily stop any payments by simply attacking said kingdom in the same turn. In the case of the Britannia run this means bribing one of the kingdoms you need to destroy to get all of their land besides their capitol and then attacking their final holding in order to secure victory and then bribing Carthage for the bulk of their lands to have enough territory under your control to complete the short campaign.

The Western Roman Empire run is even short since you can end the game in less than two turns by bribing the Eastern Roman Empire for the lands you need to reach your victory condition. All you need to do in order to be able to pull this off is to simply sell of some of your excess military units in order to ensure you'll turn a profit at the start of your second term.
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Pokemon
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Crystal: Jeez, I'm kind of regretting giving my rival the grass starter in this run since it makes dealing with him a pain in the butt since I still haven't gotten far enough into the run to have a good move for getting rid of Bayleef. This is a problem since it has access to razor leaf. So I was forced to run a very luck heavy strategy in order to get past the mandatory rival fight after beating Bugsy. And I'm nowhere near strong enough to deal with the battle at the burned tower. So I'm probably going to have to invest my next episode into conquering Glittering Lighthouse in order to get strong enough.
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Bargain Bin Saturdays
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As a whole I've found the shorts for the How To Train Your Dragon franchise rather underwhelming. This is partially because one of them is meant to help sell people on the TV series since it offers a few peaks at dragons that weren't seen in the movie. Another one of them is a holiday special with questionable writing. Another is meant to explain the origins of the sport seen at the start of the second movie. And being someone that doesn't actively follow sports I really didn't care for that scene. This is even extends to racing which is why I used to do some basic exercises while letting the pod race from "Star War: The Phantom Menace" play. This is because I don't want to work out in silence, but don't want to play anything that might truly sucks me in and distract me from my actual goal. And the final short I haven't talked about and the first to air as far as I'm aware is about Gobber befriending a dragon that everyone thinks is a myth. And this short also implies we should believe Gobber about a hammerhead yak that rides around on a hammerhead whale that can be summoned by Thor striking the Earth with lightning bolt.
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Ar Tonelico
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I'll admit I really didn't make that much progress story wise in those four episodes. I spent the bulk of my time inside Misha and Aurica's soulspaces which gives me a glimpse into their thoughts and feelings as well as allows me to unlock new spells and upgrade methods. The downside is accessing this stuff too early might actively screw me over later.

At least I know making certain decisions too early can potentially screw you out of the best ending, but I'm not willing to spend most of my time on reading a guide on this one at the moment.