Wow, how does a book go from being so good in the first book I painted it on my stairs, so the second book getting two stars?
Honestly? I wonder if the author even wanted to write this? The passion and action and heartfelt fun and intriguing characters that made Ready Player One one of my all-time favorite books just wasn't there this time! I honestly could not STAND Wade in the first half of the book. OH. MY. GLOB was he a whiney, selfish little twerp! I almost couldn't keep reading!
And the quest for the shards wasn't well parsed. It felt made up on the spot. It plodded along from one point to the next, nothing really connecting them. Shards themselves.
And the ENDING....

Spoiler

At the beginning it was all about making the earth a better place but too many people were wrapped up in their digital lives to care about the physical one. Samantha was all super angry with Wade for releasing the ONI and giving people even less of a reason to care about the physical state of our planet. Then, suddenly, we get the power to resurrect anyone who linked with the ONI into an immortal, digital avatar and Samantha gets to hug her dead grandma's consciousness made avatar and now she's totally fine. Forget about any lesson or plot from the first half of the book. And I didn't really see it as a good or happy ending. In fact, having a ship driven by Wade's digital consciousness-- a digital copy of the immature, man-baby I had to tolerate at the beginning of this book-- in charge of an entire space ship with hundreds of thousands of other uploads with their man-cave-in-the-sky and frozen embryos on their way to the closest, possibly-livable planet, is a terrifying prospect to me! I don't take that as "happily ever after" I call that "What can possibly go wrong, everything has gone great these past 5 years, only 2 lightyears to go, how could we possibly get bored or damage the servers on a ship piloted by a digital man-child?" *shudders*

To quote myself when I started reading this book and someone said "How is it?":
"It's easy to have character development when you start the character at the lowest of the low."