Reviews with content warning for Cancer - Ready Player Two

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Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline

4 reviews

a_novi's review against another edition

adventurous emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

I really enjoyed this book. I think giving wade an asshole phase once he got rich always made sense. It’s only realistic, bezos and musk style. But the challenges and experiences help him learn that his love for his friends and partner is far more important than his addiction to the internet and the oasis. The theme of mystery video game is carried over from the first book and I enjoyed the darker view we get into a disturbed Halliday’s mind. It is a good lesson for wade not to repeat the same mistakes that Halliday did. The plot twist of Anorack gaining AI consciousness was exciting and I loved the suspense of trying to defeat him! I hope they don’t butcher the movie like they did with RP1 but my hopes are low.

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aseel_reads's review

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adventurous medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

Like the first book, the info dump of 80s pop culture is annoying, but when take that all away, the plot is okay and I did like the Tolkien and prince worlds, cool premise

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nytephoenyx's review

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adventurous informative tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.75

Hey y’all. This review is going to be a spoilers haven. There are so many things that are specific and spoilers that disappointed me and I want to talk about… so this is your warning. If you haven’t already read Ready Player Two and especially if you haven’t read Ready Player One…. this is your last chance. Stay clear of this review if you don’t want spoilers!!!

…

I am not exaggerating when I say that nothing happens for the first 3.5 hours of the Ready Player Two audiobook. The reader is inundated with Wade’s righteous soliloquy of how he’s completely justified in being a self-centered asshole, while at the same time Cline overexplains VR technology and pop culture references.

And maybe, maybe this makes the book more palatable for non-gamers, non-nerds, non-pop-culture-aficionados. But in doing this, Cline has ostracized his original target audience, including me. This grandstanding of information is painfully boring to read, and in my opinion, only served as a platform for the author to prove exactly how clever he is. And I am not impressed. Especially as Wade seems have lost most of his pop culture knowledge when it really matters. In my opinion, Wade Watts is no longer a hero worth rooting for. And the book got boring from there.

For the rest of the book, I think it would be easiest if I just made a bullet list of the various things that I was disappointed by, didn’t believe, or just plain disliked.

Wade is an absolute freaking creep and I am super not okay that everyone just seemed to conveniently forget about it.
Aech and Shoto were both very much throwaway characters in this book. This is annoying one one level because Aech was a great character in book one, but on the second level Cline killed off his minorities and WTF.
The writing, as a whole, is just terrible. It’s flat and pretentious and over-explains itself.
The entire freaking epilogue is utter bull. Very pandering, plus explained character arcs that just didn’t make sense, and just a ridiculous level of happily ever after.
Halliday was also given redemption even though he absolutely did not deserve it.
For a book that was supposed to be about Kira I feel like we learned nothing new about Kira.
Samantha’s choices made absolutely no sense to her character as it was set up in Ready Player One. On top of that, she made a heavy 180-degree pivot mid-book that also made no sense. Gotta love it when the strong female character is really only there for the love story. Not.
The Low Five was grotesquely under-used. Their whole story was far more interesting and promising than Wade’s, frankly.
Where the Oasis felt well thought out and promising in Ready Player One, the worlds we visit in Ready Player Two are crowded and somehow manage to be over-explained while not being immersive at all.
The pop culture base was too scattered and too broad. One reason why all the pop culture in Ready Player One worked was because it kept to a single subset – the 80s – and one running theme – video games. In Ready Player Two we span multiple decades and genres. I think this hurt the world building in a big way – it’s too broad and it felt clear to me that Cline was not as comfortable in the topics he chose for the shards as he was for the keys/gates. Shermer, Afterworld, and the First Age planet of Middle Earth suffer in particular.
Probably just me, but how did we get through two books in this universe with only a couple Star Wars and Back to the Future references? Copyright issues?
Cline started strong with climate concerns coming from Art3mis, but dropped it all mid-book with a doomsday feel. Do they continue to care about the real world? I don’t know!!!
Listen, I think the idea of a digital afterlife is as cool as the next person, but Cline was super casual about it all. There should have been way more committees and probably lawyers involved in the decision about the Rod of Resurrection and the ONI headsets. These are life changing things. Doesn’t GSS have shareholders? Maybe they’re privately owned. :/
Also, missed opportunity on the name “Rod of Resurrection”. There’s a “Wand of Resurrection” in Runescape that even looks similar to how the Rod is described.
The timeline was incredibly tight considering the months Wade spent on Hallday’s original challenge. But the looming deadline did not seem to be on the characters’ mind most the time. Why set such a tight deadline if you’re barely going to use it to raise tension?

Okay okay.

There were some cool concepts in this book as well. Cline introduced a lot of things that I hoped would become significant. The Low Five! VR Tech! Digital Afterlife! The dying earth! All these things were substantial and interesting. They were also all used as tools to drive Samantha and Wade’s love story, and the quest in the game. Side thoughts. Throwaways. And considering all the time Cline spent overexplaining Wade’s motivations, certain popular culture references (I really did not need to know what 42 was significant. I know. And not knowing wouldn’t’ve hurt the readers), and how the tech works… he had room that could have been used for better character or world development.

I’m going to recommend a hard pass on Ready Player Two… and generally Cline’s properties other than Ready Player One itself. The minority rep was nice, the trans rep was nice, but it was not used particularly well (pushing the white man’s agenda, yay!). Even though the first book was flawed, it made up for it by being creative, immersive, and having a generally well-rounded underdog hero. There are not redeeming factors like this in Ready Player Two.

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marmmatto0's review against another edition

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adventurous funny inspiring reflective slow-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

This book is good. But, i can't stand how Ernest over describes EVERYTHING in this book like. I like immersion, but over describing a setting only makes the reading tiresome and heavy. Is the story enjoyable? leaving two chapters

The pretty in pink shard, and the incredibly boring prince shard (i spent weeks trying to end this chapter because of how tedious it was to read it)

every other one was really really enjoyable and i had a lot of fun. Though i gotta say... The end... doesn't sit right with me idk.
Do i recommend this book? If you enjoyed the first book, yes absolutely, if you didn't... i'm so sorry but it only gets worse.
3.75 / 5

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