Review Detail

Ready Player One has a really serious story at its heart(murder! corporate corruption! The world is crumbling!) but it remains an air of being so FUN just because of the character’s voice and all the wonderful ’80s references. As a ’90s baby, I can’t say I caught most of the references(though it was extra fun when I did, because I got to squeal for a moment that I knew what was going on), but they were pretty well-explained most of the time and moved the story forward.

I’m not much of a gamer, except for the concessional Legend of Zelda games my dad & I used to play when I was growing up, but as far as I can tell, Ready Player One is basically a video game in book form with a little side of reality thrown in, and I think people who like video games will really love it. It merges our current video game culture with a fantasy world and a science fiction element to create something entirely unique.

I thought the world-building in Ready Player One was really well done. Almost every time I started thinking, “But how does this work?” It was explained. How the OASIS works was one of those things I wasn’t sure I could buy into at first, but I so totally did just by virtue that the world was so cleverly laid out. I’m not sure if it was just the audiobook, but it did seem a bit info-dumpy at times–though that could just be because it takes so much longer to say words out loud than it would if I was reading it myself in print, and at any point, it never really distracted me.

The characters in Ready Player One were all quite interesting. One of the things that is mentioned a lot in the book is the OASIS persona verses real-life persona, and how similar they can be but also how different. How you can choose to hide things from people online, and the impact(both good and bad) that can have. Ready Player One never really answers that question, but brings it up for the readers to explore.

I loved the plot of Ready Player One with it’s focus on the quests. There’s a lot of great scenes in there, especially once something happens about a quarter of the way through that really ups the stakes for all the major characters involved. The evolution of the plot worked out really well in my opinion. My only minor complaint is that while Wade did have to struggle for a lot of things, towards the end some of the plot twists just seemed awfully convenient, and a little too easy. Then again, the clues for these things were placed quite deliberately earlier in the story, so they mostly made sense in context.