[1] The story follows Wade Watts who, after winning control of the OASIS, discovers an advanced virtual reality headset and subsequently a new quest for a mysterious prize.
Critics expressed disappointment in the story, writing, characters, and poor usage of references saying that it failed to expand in "new and exciting ways" on the original with many taking note of excessive similarities to Sword Art Online and other popular media in the plot.
[7] In 2015, in an interview with Den of Geek, screenwriter Zak Penn, who wrote the film adaptation of Ready Player One, reported that Ernest Cline was working on a sequel to the original novel.
[13] After the events of the first novel, the High Five have scattered across the globe: Aech is on vacation in Senegal with her fiancée, Bollywood singer Endira Vinayak.
Shoto has taken over operations at GSS's Hokkaido division, and Samantha/Art3mis has flown back to Vancouver to pack up her belongings and say goodbye to her grandmother.
Refusing to explain, she breaks up with him after realizing that their argument is hopeless and that they won't be able to reconcile their basic outlooks on the issue.
Aech, Shoto, and Wade build a spaceship christened Vonnegut, which also functions as a knowledge ark by hosting backups of humanity’s cultural materials and uploading a standalone copy of the OASIS, which they call ARC@DIA.
Og dies seconds later and Wade logs out of the OASIS but loses consciousness and wakes up 15 hours later in a GSS hospital bay.
Wade makes copies of every ONI user including his friends, himself, Samantha's grandma, Ogden Morrow, and the rest of the L0w Five.
He sends them off to Proxima Centauri on board the Vonnegut to find a habitable planet in case they are unable to stop Earth's decline.
[17][18] Amit Katwala of Wired labeled the novel a "tedious slog through arcane pop culture references sprinkled in [lazily]," calling it "something that's very similar to the first book, but much more grating the second time around.
Club and Tom Jorgensen of IGN gave Ready Player Two a C− and 4/10 respectively, with the latter saying that "inside jokes and clear reverence toward the material keep [it] from feeling like a total misfire" but ended by saying that there is "little heart to be found.
Radel stated: "It feels more like geekery gatekeeping than a showing off of knowledge and attempts to display diversity in the race and gender identity of the characters rings hollow, almost offensive.
In the sequel, making a point of saying a character could be trans or is black or gay or Japanese and then assigning stereotypical phrases...then never addressing it again does not equal inclusion."
It never occurs to [Wade] that he also could have come to the same conclusion about [Halliday's misogyny] by using the greatest empathy machine of all, his brain, and running the...program that is listening to other people and believing them about their experiences.
"[23] Readers heavily mocked it upon its first day of release, causing Ready Player Two to trend on Twitter when popular threads chided passages for their perceived pandering and poor prose.
[24] Andy Ihnatko commented that "The opening page is what it's like to be stuck on a four hour flight next to a little kid who wants to tell you knock-knock jokes the whole time.
"[25] Many comparisons were made to the anime series Sword Art Online, most notably comparing James Halliday / Anorak to Akihiko Kayaba.
Michael J. Nelson and Conor Lastowka of the podcast 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back riffed[clarification needed] on the novel's greatest shortcomings from November 2020 to February 2021.
[26][citation needed] In November 2017, Cline acknowledged that the resurgence in his motivation to write Ready Player Two was due to working on the first film's script, as well as its successes both financially and critically.