**May contain spoilers if you haven’t read Ready Player One.

Ready Player Two is the sequel to the highly appreciated 2011 book Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. After winning Halliday’s contest, Wade Watts is now one of the owners of Gregarious Simulation Systems (GSS) along with his best friends, who helped him win the contest. The story starts when he logs into the OASIS once again, after a long break. Once he is inside, he goes to Anorak’s study and takes an admiring look at Halliday’s silver Easter Egg; an object whose search and win had changed his life. However, he immediately realizes that something is different with the Egg from the last time he held it.

The Egg now had an inscription, pointing to a vault inside GSS. Wade wastes no time in finding the vault where he discovers a device; a device that’s about to change the world. James Halliday had left his final invention for his heir to find; the invention that makes the people experience OASIS never like before. It falls upon Wade to decide whether to release this device to the general public. It’s a no-brainer for him. However, little does he know, what he is about to unleash upon the world will leave it nothing like the one humankind knows.

How did it make me feel?

This was one of the most anticipated books for me in 2020. I had loved Ready Player One when I wasn’t even a science fiction fan or a science fiction reader for that matter. Ready Player One made me a science fiction fan. So obviously, the news of Ready Player Two releasing was a big deal for me.

When I was about 15-20% into the book, I believed that this was going to be awesome. The premise was super exciting and I couldn’t wait to find out how it was gonna play out. However, it got lukewarm pretty quickly. I started feeling like all the elements created to support the main storyline was forced. The introduction of this new technology, which should have been able to blow the reader’s mind, just comes out as plain and boring. You can actually feel the author desperately trying to convince you that this technology is mind-blowing, in an information-dump style rather than letting the story play it out.

I was so disappointed it actually hurt. Owing to my love for the first book, I kept on going, telling myself that this might get better. Unfortunately, it didn’t. Once I picked up on that ‘trying-too-hard’ tendency of the story, it just became too far-fetched and predictable at the same time.

For me, the characters didn’t shine through either. Wade was plain annoying, to be honest. I loved him in the first book but on this one, he is just too shallow. The quests didn’t keep me on the edge of my seat. Once in a while, some parts of the story got interesting. I think those, very few, high points in the story were the only parts that preserved the essence of Ready Player One and made it bearable. I was thankful for that, at least.

(If you haven’t read the book yet, please SKIP THIS PART)

There is this one thing at the beginning of the book that has been gnawing at my mind and it’s driving me crazy!!! Please help me if you have an answer to this question: When Wade logs in with ONI, the book says, “…every ONI users to come was to be greeted by a new message Halliday had created.. READY PLAYER TWO”.

Why? How? How was Wade player two? Or how will every other user logging in will be player two? I mean you don’t have to be a gamer to realize that unless two players are logging in simultaneously to the same game, all you have is player one, right? So, how come every player will be greeted as READY PLAYER TWO? This just doesn’t make sense!! Just to reference the name of the book? At first, I thought maybe there will be something else there, you know, maybe he will realize there already was a player one! xD

Please, oh please, let me know in the comments! 😀