Things are certainly getting better still! Ran into some weird obstacles along the way, such as...

The Environment Scene Not Loading In Correctly

It loaded in just fine in the editor, but apparently one of the plugins I used made it not load in the build. I swapped said plugin out for a better one, and the issue was fixed. Maybe sometime, I'll show the weird glitched version I had to deal with xD

Damage Number Popups Facing The Wrong Way

The numbers were fine before, but after the new Summon-implementation method, things got wonky. Turns out it's due to conflicts between the main scene's Cinemachine Brain and the one in the summon scene. To fix this, I had to create a couple scripts for managing the battle camera. That way, the damage numbers would always know where they should face. The solution still needs some polish, but it's progress ^^

Async Loading Lagging The Game

Turns out that despite all the trimming, Jiaolong's sequence took quite a few clock cycles, making things lag. That's probably for the following reasons:

- The anim involved models and such actually doing their thing in 3D space (as opposed to being shown through a pre-recorded video)

- Jiaolong had a Priority stat of 100, making him near-guaranteed to go up first in a round of battle

As for how I dealt with this, I set Jiaolong's Priority to negative 100. With that, the lag was no more. Now you may be asking... "Tespy, making Glenn Price's dragon wait is what fixed the lag? How does that work?" Well, that's because of how I coded the skill-execution sequence. You see, before any skills get executed, the system starts async loading sequences such as the summon anims. Keyword: "starts".

That means that until the time comes to show said anims, it executes other skills as normal. And when the time does come, the game waits until the appropriate sequence is done loading. And now you can see why Jiaolong's positive priority stat caused lag, while making it negative fixed it. Of course, this solution isn't very good... Good thing I have other fixes in mind to try out! ^^