So Yusaku and Aoi tag duel I am excited, maybe this will open Yusaku's eyes to not try to do everything by himself and we can start to form our team here.
That would certainly be nice. I'm tired of Vrains being the Yusaku show and he doesn't even have any noteworthy interactions with Shoichi. He's just the bland tech support for Yusaku. It might make him realize that he does need help and Aoi being his first new alley would be fitting. She was in danger because of the Knights of Hanoi, but that would also mean that she'd realize how threatening they can be and Akira would probably be willing to help Yusaku out due to saving Aoi's life too.
Anyway, I thought that this episode was okay. I wasn't expecting Yusaku to look for Aoi. I thought that he was trying to figure out if Ema went to their school for some reason, even though that doesn't make much sense when she's clearly older than him. I figured that Akira would prevent Aoi from going anywhere and not telling her duel. Some might say that he was being too protective, but in his defense, Aoi was put into a coma and would have stayed that way if it wasn't for Yusaku, so keeping her safe was completely understandable. I still don't like Ema, but I'll admit that using her defeat to her advantage was pretty smart. She wasn't planning on losing before, but using Playmaker as a distraction would allow for her and Akira to look into the data bank themselves. She even seemed to have a plan for Aoi spying on them too.
Of course, Yusaku figured that there was something suspicious about the whole setup because he's such a perfect Gary Stu. I still don't understand how this world works. I figured that Link Vrains was the only place people could transport online, but Yusaku could go inside of a computer and shoot out Sphere Kuriboh in order to protect himself from security programs. And Akira and Ema could do the same thing with special devices when I thought that it relied on a duel disk. I don't even know how to figure this out and the show isn't going to explain anything about that. They just want to use it for a cool flash rather than actually expand on the setting and provide some world building.
I should have expected Yusaku would face off against these AI duelists from SOL Technologies. They were trying really hard to make it seem like Yusaku would lose. Admittedly, a hand elimination deck is annoyingly frustrating to deal with, but when your main character has seemingly defeated all of the established duelists introduced thus far, I'm not going to worry if he'll be defeated by AI duelists created by a really obvious minor villain. Even the other workers were shocked that he'd just want to grab Playmaker's duel disk instead of defeating him in a duel. I'm not sure if he could have gotten Ignis that way either since Yusaku has said that the only way to get Ignis is to defeat him in a duel.
Aoi coming in to help was kind of a neat twist, but of course she said that she'd be the one to defeat Playmaker. At least that leads into a Yusaku and Aoi tag duel and that could be interesting. I would like it if Yusaku finally realized that he can't do everything on his own and that he does need more help besides Shoichi. There could be some interesting strategies between Yusaku and Aoi during the duel. This whole episode was mainly setup, but rather boring setup in my opinion. The tag duel might be at least something different and interesting to watch.