O_O
After saving a couple of kids from the members of the Army, we meet Yulier and she wants to save their leader, Thinker inside a dungeon found in the Town of Beginnings. Yui decides to tag along with them and ends up into a situation we didn't expect them to be in.
The episode is quite an emotional roller coaster ride since for starters, the Army felt like a bunch of corrupt players on how they were first introduced in the series. Learning that the group became like that because of the amount of new members and that a certain Kibaou is taking the lead in the group, it is no surprise that the group became that corrupt group. One thing to note about the Army is the member named Kibaou, to those who forgot the guy; he is the one who claimed that Kirito cheated in the game. I am not surprised that he ended up becoming that corrupt since he is willing to backstab, to lie and to cheat other players just to be on top. His face clearly shows that he will become like that! The only thing that disappoints me is that we never saw Kibaou's current appearance.
Another thing that disappoint me is that instead of having a flashback scene with Yulier as a narrator, we have a scene of them sitting on a table during the duration Yulier is briefing them about the Army and their leader, Thinker. It kinda felt boring since all they do is to take a lot of faraway shots while Yulier talks about the current situation. The briefing ended with Yulier wanting Kirito and Asuna's help. Since the Army has this bad reputation around them, it is natural for Asuna to ask if they can be trusted. But thanks to Yui, they decided to help Yulier since she feels like she can be trusted. Kids and their power of persuasion, it always works.
After clearing a couple of monsters in the dungeon found in the Town of Beginnings, which Kirito noted not being part of the original beta test, a true threat finally surfaced, a reaper that looks like he shouldn't exist in that dungeon and should appear on the game's 90th floor and higher. Even if that is the case, they found Thinker and planned to escape but Kirito and Asuna decided to stay to give Thinker, Yulier and Yui a chance to escape. This is when we saw a rather unexpected sight.
As expected, Kirito and Asuna were beaten by the reaper but Yui, with one strike of a flame sword that just came out of nowhere easily destroyed the creature. Even though the earlier fight with the reaper has a lot of bad animation frames, this single scene is really well done that it feels like they just saved a lot of animation budget just to do this single scene and what happens after it.
As it turns out, Yui is an AI program created by the central program of the game called Cardinal to take charge of the player's psychological welfare. Considering that the game's environment is similar to the real world, I am not surprised that the game has such program. But what I didn't expect is that the Cardinal didn't release Yui out of the field during the time most players feel suicidal. The fact that the system is created that no human can intervene with it bothered me for a sec since if Yui was created by the Cardinal for the sole purpose of taking care the player's psychological welfare, why can't the system let her do the job? This caused me to conclude one thing, Kayaba planned this to happen.
Because Yui can't do her job as a program, as expected, bugs in her programming start to pop up and Kirito and Asuna's psychological parameters is the trigger that made her leave the Cardinal's central programming. This explained why she has amnesia when Kirito and Asuna first met her. If there is one thing I can safely conclude about Yui, she is more human compared to Kayaba even though she was programed to have emotions and the like as she showed great concern on the players whom she considered as her parents.
Since she interfered with a monster program, Cardinal has no choice but to destroy her since she is a renegade program. As I have noted earlier, the animation for this scene is really well done like they saved the budget for this episode just for this scene and Yui's defeating the reaper. Kirito decided to use Yui's GM access to back her up and turn her into a game object called "Yui's Heart". At the end, we learn that Kirito can recreate Yui once they log out the game, making Asuna hopeful that they can see their first daughter again.
