Wade wakes up every morning to a song from Marty McFly’s clock radio-that is, if he’s not woken by a call on Cameron Frye’s bedside phone first. As in the first book, your mileage may vary with the multitudinous pop culture references, which are still present and still overwhelming. The broader RP2 plot, of course, is chiefly a vehicle for nostalgia. The Force Awakens asks “What if the Death Star were the size of a planet?!” and The Rise of Skywalker wonders “What if there were a bunch of ships with the power of the Death Star in a massive fleet?!?!?!” But because the crux of the story remains the same, a rerun of the same plot brings diminished returns. This sort of artificial inflation of stakes is a common issue with sequels, afflicting even the most lucrative and famous franchises. Pure Imagination and Clunky Source Material: A Conversation About ‘Ready Player One’
In the first book, the lives of Wade and a few others hang in the balance in the sequel, that number is a lot higher. For instance, in the first book, Wade needs to collect three items to complete the quest in the sequel, that number is seven.
RP2 is basically RP1 but bigger and better, with even more stakes. If those two sentences sound eerily similar, that’s because they encapsulate the first problem with RP2: its embodiment of sequel creep. And in the sequel, Wade must use his obsessive knowledge of nostalgic pop culture to win another of Halliday’s posthumous scavenger hunts. In the first book (spoilers), protagonist Wade Watts uses his obsessive knowledge of nostalgic pop culture to win a scavenger hunt organized by the OASIS’s late creator, James Halliday, and become his successor. Like its predecessor, RP2 takes place in the 2040s and mostly in the OASIS, a virtual reality simulation game that dominates global entertainment. But in the process, and in the rush to leap into a breakneck plot, the sequel loses the creativity and balance that made the fictional world worth mining. Released last Tuesday, the sequel novel replays all the hits from the story that made The New York Times bestseller list, and Cline’s career. This is our first return to the fictional world dreamed up by Ernest Cline since the publication of Ready Player One nine years ago-or, for a considerable percentage of readers, since the movie adaptation in 2018. On page 6, the main character learns about a new piece of civilization-changing technology on page 17, after one brief test run, he unleashes it on the world. Ready Player Two doesn’t wait to accelerate into its plot.
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