spends untold riches on decking out his gagillionnaire hideout, reluctantly trying to throw some cash onto the world’s issues before deciding that the world is going to hell anyway. In this one, however, we get Wade 2.0- now an entitled and petulant multi-gagillionnaire man-child OASIS owner who: Wade Watts of the first book was easy to root for (being a plucky underdog and all that jazz). “Or I could just log in to the OASIS, where I was treated like a god, and where everything now felt completely real-as real as the most vivid dreams feel while you’re having them.”. And hero worship, for the wish fulfillment pleasure. A few plot contrivances will still get us the quest with all the above, with riding into the sunset with the girl included. Even if all that seemingly was already achieved by the end of the first book. Whether it makes sense or not, the point is to tediously recreate yet another quest for magical objects based on the poorly rhymed riddles made from beyond the grave by an oddball OASIS creator James Halliday and grounded in obscure 1980s trivia, with the same band of characters as before and the quest to get the girl.

“We’re gonna be looking for Horcruxes next.” “Jeez Louise,” Shoto said, rolling his eyes. Let’s guess which one this sequel follows. The other is to try to please the fans by sticking to the same exact formula that netted you success. One is to develop the world and the characters further, take risks, push boundaries. With a sequel, you have two paths you can take. A crazy old man’s shrine to a bunch of pointless crap.”

The entire OASIS is like one giant graveyard, haunted by the undead pop-culture icons of a bygone era. “Don’t you kids ever get tired of picking through the wreckage of a past generation’s nostalgia?” He stretched his arms out wide. And since it led to a successful (although seriously dumbed down) movie and probably loads of cash for the creator of this world, we all knew the sequel was to come, and by Hollywood rules anyone could have predicted the most likely title. It’s hard not to root for a determined self-taught orphan who’s set to take on an evil entity and succeeds against all odds, resulting in a world that’s better than the one he started in. Yes, it was a trivia-laden wish fulfillment, but it appealed to our human instinct of rooting for an underdog against soulless evil. I got a huge kick out of its predecessor, Ready Player One, even if it often read like the reiteration of Wikipedia pages of the 1980s trivia. It’s been a while since I’ve been this irritated by a book. That’s the phrase that repeats itself over and over in my Kindle notes as I was slogging my way through this soulless cash grab of a clusterf*ck.

Ready player two