Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-173.69.148.56-20140221235829/@comment-3432276-20141214002122

82.21.12.106 wrote: Maybe so but that image of her seen from the first month is merely a visualisation for us as viewers to identify Yui then with Yui now, she says she can change her appearance to who ever she is interacting with to make them at ease. so she has no form until she enters Aincrad on floor 22, until then she is just an AI routine and no one watching/reading would want to see a ball of light/data coding it doesn't have the impact as a girl upset over the suicide of players. That's hardly a justifiable reason for her semblance to Sachi. She would not just 'happen' to bear the same physical appearance in the visualization as she did when she appeared to Kirito and Asuna. She didn't even know those two until they rescued her in the forest on Floor 22. Prior to that, the only thing that she noticed about them was the vast difference their mental parameters had to the rest of the game's population.

Furthermore, she stated herself that after Cardinal stonewalled her from interacting with players, the conflict that this created with her logic processes (i.e. If X player is traumatized, then go comfort X player) caused errors to build up in her programming. It's fairly likely that all those piled up errors made it impossible for her to perform most of her functions properly, including the function of changing her appearance. The fact that she was even able to leave her designated spot in the program matrix and go out to find Kirito and Asuna while in that state is miraculous in and of itself.

That body she had (in the visualization of her past) was her original body. If there was any deliberate semblance to Sachi at all, it was likely only Reki Kawahara's way of alluding to Sachi's memory "living on" or something like that, not Yui trying to emulate one of Kirito's dead friends.