Ready Player Two
Year: 2020
Author: Ernest Cline
Publsher: Century
Pages: 366
Published: 02/12/21
Author: Ernest Cline
Publsher: Century
Pages: 366
Published: 02/12/21
Warning: This review contains spoilers for Ready Player One and Ready Player Two
When I first read Ready Player One in 2016 I was utterly captivated in a way that a book had not managed to do since I was a child. Following Wade Watts and his avatar Parzival’s quest to win a game designers Easter Egg hunt in a virtual reality online game in order to take control of said world and the designers fortune was a story that felt both familiar and extremely fresh. Despite some issues of Wade being a bit of a douchebag at times, and the quality of writing being not much more than a glorified geek-off about 80’s game, film, and music trivia; the book was generally great and I would recommend anyone with a passing interest in geek culture check it out.
Ernest Cline’s follow up book, Armada, was similar in the sense that it too relished in geek trivia and video games being the key to saving humanity. But it lacked the same spark that Ready Player One did. Perhaps again due to the quality of the writing.
Now almost a decade after Ready Player One’s release, and two years after its Hollywood film adaptation, we have a full-blown sequel. But does Ready Player Two stumble over the same hurdles that the original book and Armada did, or has Cline finally invested enough XP into his creative writing skills to level up?
After winning Halliday’s Hunt, Wade Watts is now the CEO of Gregarious Simulation Systems and the heir to James Halliday’s enormous fortune. Wade shares his fortunes and new job position with the surviving members of the High Five, Aech, Shoto, and Art3mis so that they may help him improve the OASIS, and help humanity have a better future in a world that is on the brink of environmental collapse. However, shortly after winning the contest Wade discovers that Halliday had created a new headset peripheral to access the OASIS that taps directly into the users brainwaves, no longer requiring the typical VR setup, called the ONI. Despite Art3mis & former CEO Ogden Morrow’s protests, Wade, Aech, and Shoto release the ONI to the public. Once enough ONI units have been activated a new Easter Egg hunt from Halliday emerges to hunt down the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul, a hunt that only Wade and Ogden Morrow can compete in.
Three years pass with no progress on the hunt. Wade has become a recluse like Halliday was, OASIS users have become disillusioned by Wade’s general demeanour, and Art3mis refuses to acknowledge Wade’s existence. Ogden has asked Wade to abandon the hunt for the Shards, but desperate to prove himself the biggest Halliday fan in the world Wade persists; only to realise too late that the man he idolises actually poses the greatest risk to the human race the world has ever known.
I’m going to get this out of the way now, Ready Player Two is not anywhere near as original or enjoyable as Ready Player One. But there is still enjoyment to be found within it. The biggest problem Ready Player Two has is that come the end of Ready Player One everything inside the OASIS is perfect, it’s just the real world that needs saving, and that’s what I thought we were going to get (I wasn’t the only one judging by the extremely negative reception it’s getting from fans of the original). Instead it’s almost like a reset button is hit and the whole thing starts from square one again. Wade forgets the lesson he learned at the end of Ready Player One, about the OASIS needing to be restricted so humanity can work on fixing the planet, within the first few pages of the book and reforms back into his old ways of using the OASIS all day every day and pushing the game harder than ever on the human population by releasing the ONI.
All of the progression his character made in Ready Player One to stop being that elitist Halliday geek who only cared about himself is undone within minutes of reading the sequel for absolutely no reason. It essentially makes the message of the first book completely redundant, and then spends the entirety of this book hammering home the exact same message in almost the exact same way.
Ready Player Two also jumps the shark massively in terms of believability. I’m not going to hold back with spoilers from here on out, but I feel like I’ve made my point clear enough for those of you who don’t want to read spoilers. Ready Player One managed to be believable because the technology that makes the OASIS work already exists in our world. Not anywhere near as powerful as what the OASIS needs, but we have VR games and equipment, as well as VR social spaces to interact with people in. Ready Player Two deals primarily with a piece of equipment that scans peoples brains to make digital replicas of them in the form of A.I, and then the original A.I, one of James Halliday’s avatar Anorak, goes rogue and tries to wipe out humanity. This sudden gear shift from the first book which was sort of like The Matrix meets Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, into something that is more akin to The Matrix meets Terminator is a tough pill to swallow and the stakes become so disproportional to what is actually happening that it all feels a bit silly.
This is also represented in the time scale the book takes place in. Where the bulk of Ready Player One took place across a year or so, Ready Player Two mostly takes place across twelve hours. We go from a year long hunt for three keys with richly detailed information about old games, movies, and music. Into a frantic twelve-hour sprint for seven shards where references are just bombarding you with no real depth, context, or nuance.
Anorak also fundamentally doesn’t work as a villain because of how we have been introduced to him, and Halliday, throughout Ready Player One. We are told how Halliday is some meek weirdo who doesn’t really talk to people because he’d much rather just play some Dungeons and Dragons. Now he is some maniacal, genocidal overlord that’s invincible. I just really struggle to picture a person who in their description sounds like the thirteen-year-old me, as an all powerful entity that’s trying to kill billions of people.
I want to talk about Aech, Shoto, and Art3mis for a minute because oh boy did they get done dirty. Aech was one of the most interesting late novel reveals in Ready Player One because this dude who had been friends with Wade for years online actually turned out to be a girl. It was a great slap in the face to Wade and put him in his place. She gets a girlfriend and is fighting for civil rights at the start of this book, only to literally never have any of that explained beyond a paragraph or so in the first chapter. Shoto and Art3mis aren’t even in the book all that much. Shoto gets bumped off about halfway through and has the most half arsed attempt at fleshing his real-world self just like Aech got. Art3mis is rightly so not present all that much until the end, and she gets absolutely no extra characterisation. Plus, for someone who was so angry at Wade for the way he treats her at the start of the story, she literally forgives him because she feels obligated to, rather than him doing anything to repair their relationship. I HATED IT!!!
We also get the briefest of introductions to a new set of Gunters called the L0w Five, led by a girl named L0hengrin, who help Wade in his quest to collect the Seven Shards and destroy Anorak. But L0hengrin herself is only in three chapters, and her friends who’s names I have completely forgotten only appear for a few sentences in two separate chapters. This character solely exists as a Deus Ex Machina twice in the story and for some reason she has four friends who barely even exist! These characters were completely wasted, there's a whole other book's worth of probably more interesting stuff happening with these characters, why were they not more present in the story this time around?!
I should have seen the red flags a while ago when the book was first announced. Cline made a statement about why he was writing a sequel and it can basically be summed as, the film was so successful that he knew the studio would want to make a sequel film, so he used that as his inspiration to write the second book. It’s not even that Cline felt there was a story to tell, it's because he thought that a movie studio would want to make another blockbuster out of it! It is honestly one of the worst reasons I’ve ever heard of as to why an author decided to write a book.
But I need to talk about the good stuff before I wrap up because all I’ve done is say how terrible everything in this book is in comparison to Ready Player One. But I really loved how Cline expanded on Halliday, Morrow, and more specifically Morrow’s wife Kira Underwood. Kira is bumped up the pecking order so much that she becomes more central to the plot than almost anything else in the book, and finally getting to know more about her character is great, especially how she drastically altered the relationship Halliday & Morrow had with each other.
There are also some great sequences such as a shard hunt that takes them through almost the entire John Hughes film catalogue as the characters attempt to change the ending of Sixteen Candles. There’s also another good sequence towards the end where our heroes find themselves in the First Age of Middle Earth (which had the Tolkien fan in me beaming with joy). Unfortunately, though a lot of these sequences, no matter how good, still pale in comparison to much of what was presented in the original book.
Ready Player Two is a collection of good ideas that ultimately fail to connect cohesively to produce a good story. Where Ready Player One was lightning in a bottle in the fact that it managed to connect the dots between such disparate geek fandoms in meaningful ways that were thrilling to fans and newcomers to that information alike; Ready Player Two instead feels as though it’s clutching at straws in an attempt to replicate the same one in a million kind of story Ready Player One was, without understanding what really made it work.
It’s here where Ready Player Two feels more in line with a fanfiction than an actual sequel. It’s got all the components that should make a good sequel to Ready Player One, but the execution has been done so ham fistedly that it feels a little embarrassing, and completely convoluted.
Where Ready Player One is a must read for anyone who enjoys sci-fi novels, adventure novels, or geek culture; Ready Player Two is something I find hard to recommend to fans or newcomers because I don’t really know who this book is actually for.
Ernest Cline’s follow up book, Armada, was similar in the sense that it too relished in geek trivia and video games being the key to saving humanity. But it lacked the same spark that Ready Player One did. Perhaps again due to the quality of the writing.
Now almost a decade after Ready Player One’s release, and two years after its Hollywood film adaptation, we have a full-blown sequel. But does Ready Player Two stumble over the same hurdles that the original book and Armada did, or has Cline finally invested enough XP into his creative writing skills to level up?
After winning Halliday’s Hunt, Wade Watts is now the CEO of Gregarious Simulation Systems and the heir to James Halliday’s enormous fortune. Wade shares his fortunes and new job position with the surviving members of the High Five, Aech, Shoto, and Art3mis so that they may help him improve the OASIS, and help humanity have a better future in a world that is on the brink of environmental collapse. However, shortly after winning the contest Wade discovers that Halliday had created a new headset peripheral to access the OASIS that taps directly into the users brainwaves, no longer requiring the typical VR setup, called the ONI. Despite Art3mis & former CEO Ogden Morrow’s protests, Wade, Aech, and Shoto release the ONI to the public. Once enough ONI units have been activated a new Easter Egg hunt from Halliday emerges to hunt down the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul, a hunt that only Wade and Ogden Morrow can compete in.
Three years pass with no progress on the hunt. Wade has become a recluse like Halliday was, OASIS users have become disillusioned by Wade’s general demeanour, and Art3mis refuses to acknowledge Wade’s existence. Ogden has asked Wade to abandon the hunt for the Shards, but desperate to prove himself the biggest Halliday fan in the world Wade persists; only to realise too late that the man he idolises actually poses the greatest risk to the human race the world has ever known.
I’m going to get this out of the way now, Ready Player Two is not anywhere near as original or enjoyable as Ready Player One. But there is still enjoyment to be found within it. The biggest problem Ready Player Two has is that come the end of Ready Player One everything inside the OASIS is perfect, it’s just the real world that needs saving, and that’s what I thought we were going to get (I wasn’t the only one judging by the extremely negative reception it’s getting from fans of the original). Instead it’s almost like a reset button is hit and the whole thing starts from square one again. Wade forgets the lesson he learned at the end of Ready Player One, about the OASIS needing to be restricted so humanity can work on fixing the planet, within the first few pages of the book and reforms back into his old ways of using the OASIS all day every day and pushing the game harder than ever on the human population by releasing the ONI.
All of the progression his character made in Ready Player One to stop being that elitist Halliday geek who only cared about himself is undone within minutes of reading the sequel for absolutely no reason. It essentially makes the message of the first book completely redundant, and then spends the entirety of this book hammering home the exact same message in almost the exact same way.
Ready Player Two also jumps the shark massively in terms of believability. I’m not going to hold back with spoilers from here on out, but I feel like I’ve made my point clear enough for those of you who don’t want to read spoilers. Ready Player One managed to be believable because the technology that makes the OASIS work already exists in our world. Not anywhere near as powerful as what the OASIS needs, but we have VR games and equipment, as well as VR social spaces to interact with people in. Ready Player Two deals primarily with a piece of equipment that scans peoples brains to make digital replicas of them in the form of A.I, and then the original A.I, one of James Halliday’s avatar Anorak, goes rogue and tries to wipe out humanity. This sudden gear shift from the first book which was sort of like The Matrix meets Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, into something that is more akin to The Matrix meets Terminator is a tough pill to swallow and the stakes become so disproportional to what is actually happening that it all feels a bit silly.
This is also represented in the time scale the book takes place in. Where the bulk of Ready Player One took place across a year or so, Ready Player Two mostly takes place across twelve hours. We go from a year long hunt for three keys with richly detailed information about old games, movies, and music. Into a frantic twelve-hour sprint for seven shards where references are just bombarding you with no real depth, context, or nuance.
Anorak also fundamentally doesn’t work as a villain because of how we have been introduced to him, and Halliday, throughout Ready Player One. We are told how Halliday is some meek weirdo who doesn’t really talk to people because he’d much rather just play some Dungeons and Dragons. Now he is some maniacal, genocidal overlord that’s invincible. I just really struggle to picture a person who in their description sounds like the thirteen-year-old me, as an all powerful entity that’s trying to kill billions of people.
I want to talk about Aech, Shoto, and Art3mis for a minute because oh boy did they get done dirty. Aech was one of the most interesting late novel reveals in Ready Player One because this dude who had been friends with Wade for years online actually turned out to be a girl. It was a great slap in the face to Wade and put him in his place. She gets a girlfriend and is fighting for civil rights at the start of this book, only to literally never have any of that explained beyond a paragraph or so in the first chapter. Shoto and Art3mis aren’t even in the book all that much. Shoto gets bumped off about halfway through and has the most half arsed attempt at fleshing his real-world self just like Aech got. Art3mis is rightly so not present all that much until the end, and she gets absolutely no extra characterisation. Plus, for someone who was so angry at Wade for the way he treats her at the start of the story, she literally forgives him because she feels obligated to, rather than him doing anything to repair their relationship. I HATED IT!!!
We also get the briefest of introductions to a new set of Gunters called the L0w Five, led by a girl named L0hengrin, who help Wade in his quest to collect the Seven Shards and destroy Anorak. But L0hengrin herself is only in three chapters, and her friends who’s names I have completely forgotten only appear for a few sentences in two separate chapters. This character solely exists as a Deus Ex Machina twice in the story and for some reason she has four friends who barely even exist! These characters were completely wasted, there's a whole other book's worth of probably more interesting stuff happening with these characters, why were they not more present in the story this time around?!
I should have seen the red flags a while ago when the book was first announced. Cline made a statement about why he was writing a sequel and it can basically be summed as, the film was so successful that he knew the studio would want to make a sequel film, so he used that as his inspiration to write the second book. It’s not even that Cline felt there was a story to tell, it's because he thought that a movie studio would want to make another blockbuster out of it! It is honestly one of the worst reasons I’ve ever heard of as to why an author decided to write a book.
But I need to talk about the good stuff before I wrap up because all I’ve done is say how terrible everything in this book is in comparison to Ready Player One. But I really loved how Cline expanded on Halliday, Morrow, and more specifically Morrow’s wife Kira Underwood. Kira is bumped up the pecking order so much that she becomes more central to the plot than almost anything else in the book, and finally getting to know more about her character is great, especially how she drastically altered the relationship Halliday & Morrow had with each other.
There are also some great sequences such as a shard hunt that takes them through almost the entire John Hughes film catalogue as the characters attempt to change the ending of Sixteen Candles. There’s also another good sequence towards the end where our heroes find themselves in the First Age of Middle Earth (which had the Tolkien fan in me beaming with joy). Unfortunately, though a lot of these sequences, no matter how good, still pale in comparison to much of what was presented in the original book.
Ready Player Two is a collection of good ideas that ultimately fail to connect cohesively to produce a good story. Where Ready Player One was lightning in a bottle in the fact that it managed to connect the dots between such disparate geek fandoms in meaningful ways that were thrilling to fans and newcomers to that information alike; Ready Player Two instead feels as though it’s clutching at straws in an attempt to replicate the same one in a million kind of story Ready Player One was, without understanding what really made it work.
It’s here where Ready Player Two feels more in line with a fanfiction than an actual sequel. It’s got all the components that should make a good sequel to Ready Player One, but the execution has been done so ham fistedly that it feels a little embarrassing, and completely convoluted.
Where Ready Player One is a must read for anyone who enjoys sci-fi novels, adventure novels, or geek culture; Ready Player Two is something I find hard to recommend to fans or newcomers because I don’t really know who this book is actually for.