While I think Sandy finds an identity of sorts by the end of Battle 6, this set of three battles is where it really kicks into gear for me as what I remember doing with Sandy back then. A villainous Narrator, the three protagonists of Dave, Davis and Veemon rather than just Dave. Whatever I think of the quality of these battles now, this is where Sandy moves from having some sort of identity to starting to feel like what I remember Sandy being.
Battle 7 - On Punishing a Narrator
...Ah. The one that I felt the need to put what in modern parlance would be a content warning on. Except it doesn't work as a content warning - 'mildly offensive' my ass, 'mild scatological content' is more like it.
A saturated blue on black for Veemon's text colour. Great contrast, there. This was a mild issue with the tournament since, well, one-off characters. I get why I'd want to give Veemon his own font colour, he's basically a second player, but that font colour was a terrible choice of one.
Huh, first 'don't call people it' gags and it's applied to Veemon. And straight into a recurring loop of dialogue. I don't think there's enough variance here to really work, and I think I wrote this before encountering Who's On First so it wasn't a deliberate homage but I no doubt had previously encountered things referencing Who's On First because who hasn't?
And the bodily fluid nonsense begins with the Narrator interpreting 'accident' as 'peeing oneself' and then pees on Veemon turning him into Peemon. Low brow for sure, gross, definitely, but this was written after Red's infamous Battle 70 - All of Sandy was - so it was hardly the grossest thing in PB at the point it was written. And then has a vomit gag.
This is the first suggestion of an 'evil Narrator' in Sandy Version (and the second time the Narrator was a threat to the version)
Battle 8 - The Third Controller
The recap notes the first part of the battle is based on a true story, and I have actually played Table Tennis like that. In secondary school.
"IT has DANE" instead of "IT has DONE" is a bizarre typo even for me. (and this Narrator is still using way too much capslock even by Narrator standards)
That leads to a fairly stock PB colour change gag, a first for Sandy.
I do like the anti-story mode as a concept, but it feels like there should be a bit more build-up to it.
And... How is the Narrator wrestling? Or having shins? I could have worked a joke out of the impossibility of it if I wanted but... That doesn't really happen here? My conception of SVWebmaster and Narrator's corporeal forms or lack of them was very shaky in early Sandy.
"NARRATOR STRUGGLES to READ THAT TEXT COLOUR on a BLACK BACKGROUND!" - Yes. Anyone would. #515151 on black. Contrast ratio of 2.64:1 - That's not good enough for AA standards of large text. And if I knew it was enough of a problem to lampshade, I should have fixed it.
The idea that there's a 'manual switch' to activate prose is funny to me, but I don't think I'm consistent with the conditions for Anti-story mode appearing for it to work as a threat here. But, hey, evil godlike beings that are more powerful than Webmasters. That's a fun concept. And I wrote resolution of how Narrator and Narratora thing got resolved. Weird to place it in Battle 8 rather than in Battle 6.01, but ok.
"Narrator excrement" is overstating urine and puke a fair bit.
I think this battle has some good points to it, but they don't quite click together for me.
Battle 9 - The Following Battle
The semi-colon between the title and the date works a lot better but really is unneeded. I'm sure I thought I was being clever with the title, but beats me what I meant with it.
Turning half of Davis' personality into Brock's was a mistake, and one I hope I stopped going to at some point.
The tic-tac-toe gag is cute, as is Davis being able to pronounce Rsaci but not the Narrator.
I think the 'infinite hp' gag would work much better if it didn't meander so much, although all the sidetracks are at least gags.
If I was writing it today, I'd probably have made the 'started with infinity squared' part of the gag more... Mathematically accurate - The Narrator having dropped from an uncountable infinity hp to a countable infinity hp since infinity and infinity squared are equal while uncountable infinity is a larger class of infinity than countable infinity.
I don't know if that would actually make the gag funnier, but it would annoy me less when reading it back, and I can't help but smile at the idea of Battles being pokemon who can faint, die, and run away. Not sure why I don't really do that in modern Sandy.