Reviews with content warning for Sexual content - Ready Player Two

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Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline

5 reviews

kelly_e's review

adventurous tense medium-paced

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

2.75

Title: Ready Player Two
Author: Ernest Cline
Series: Ready Player One #2
Genre: Science Fiction
Rating: 2.75
Pub Date: November 24, 2020

T H R E E • W O R D S

Imaginative • Adventurous • Disappointing

📖 S Y N O P S I S

Days after winning OASIS founder James Halliday's contest, Wade Watts makes a discovery that changes everything.

Hidden within Halliday's vaults, waiting for his heir to find, lies a technological advancement that will once again change the world and make the OASIS a thousand times more wondrous--and addictive--than even Wade dreamed possible.

With it comes a new riddle, and a new quest--a last Easter egg from Halliday, hinting at a mysterious prize.

And an unexpected, impossibly powerful, and dangerous new rival awaits, one who'll kill millions to get what he wants.

Wade's life and the future of the OASIS are again at stake, but this time the fate of humanity also hangs in the balance.

💭 T H O U G H T S

I absolutely (and surprisingly) loved Ready Player One, so I was excited when I found out there would be a sequel. Unfortunately, this one didn't have the same impact as the first one did.

Some of the ideas and quests were interesting, yet as the story progressed I found it harder and harder to stay invested in what was happening, which was the opposite in book one. Oddly, as the stakes got higher, I found myself caring less. It's quite possible that there's just too much content that I didn't know about or relate to. Wade's character arc shows a lot of development from start to finish, something we didn't get in book one. The focus on a group of friends working together to solve the quests was appreciated.

Ready Player One is one of those books that would have been better off left as a stand-alone. I can understand some readers are really going to be drawn into it if they have an interest in all of the pop culture references. Again, I'd highly recommend the audio narrated by Wil Wheaton as he does a fantastic job.

📚 R E C O M M E N D • T O
• 80/90s babies
• science fiction fans

🔖 F A V O U R I T E • Q U O T E S

"Human beings were never meant to participate in a worldwide social network comprised of billions of people. We were designed by evolution to be hunter-gatherers, with the mental capacity to interact and socialize with the other members of our tribe—a tribe made up of a few hundred other people at most. Interacting with thousands or even millions of other people on a daily basis was way too much for our ape-descended melons to handle. That was why social media had been gradually driving the entire population of the world insane since it emerged back around the turn of the century."

Content Warnings

ishouldbereading's review against another edition

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adventurous medium-paced

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

4.75

Content Warnings

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.

Content Warnings

sakusha's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous medium-paced

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

4.0

“It's cool to use the computer,
don't let the computer use you.
There is a war going on.
The battlefield’s in the mind.
And the prize is the soul.” (135)

This book has a more rushed feel to it, because there’s a time limit on the quest they’re supposed to complete.

I like the character Art3mis/Samantha. She wants to use her wealth to make the world a better place.

Maybe I’m remembering incorrectly, but it seemed like the Anorak from the first book was a reserved, shy guy. But the one in this book has a completely different personality. I didn’t like the difference. I think the author could’ve made him a villain while still keeping his personality consistent.

Shoto seems to have no unique or consistent personality either. In the first book, he also seemed reserved and serious. But in this book, he talks like a typical American teen: “Oh shit! That would be dope!” (188) Isn’t he from Japan? Why would he be talking like that?

Aech has a personality, but it’s an unlikable one. She’s a typical liberal millennial who’s always whining about sexism and homophobia. She’s a jerk to her mom and to her own best friend, the main character. “I don’t give a shit about Arda III, Z! What about this planet? How many quests have you completed here, on Arda I?” (294) She’s all on Wade’s case for not having completed all of the quests there. Well, what’s Aech’s excuse? Why hasn’t SHE completed all the quests there? Why should Wade have to do everything?

Other people have complained about Wade’s personality, but I didn’t have a problem with his. What he did when he became rich and powerful was completely realistic and normal. Most wealthy people waste their money on unnecessary stuff, and most powerful people abuse their power. Do you really think you would be any different, and at Wade’s young age?

I didn’t like the ending because it was too optimistic. Humanity was now going to get digital immortality, seeking out new planets to colonize, while they were not making any effort to improve earth. Every human is just escaping reality while their real bodies rot away. And they want to repeat the same mistakes on another planet? How selfish and irresponsible. Humans don’t deserve to live forever. They are way too destructive and hedonistic. And being immortal would only increase those traits. It would have been nice if Wade realized this too. And pushed the big red button to delete the Oasis forever.

Content Warnings

tzoukeeper's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous medium-paced

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

1.0

Content Warnings

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