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Ready Player Two (Ready Player One, Book 2) by Ernest Cline

I knew this was going to be bad, but WOW! 😯💩

RP2 is just a worse version of its predecessor. It's just another race to hunt down powerful hidden objects within the Oasis. The problem here is the lack of capitalizing on the world building that's been done. For all intents and purposes, the series takes place within the Oasis, a virtual reality world where anything is possible and a countless variety of stories can be told 💭, and yet Cline decided to just do the same thing 🤦‍♂️. It's as if he doesn't know how to think outside of the box he's created for himself. Adding to this complete lack of creativity, Cline blatantly rips off Sword Art Online and tries to get away with it by making one of his trademark references to it. Even if he had literally told the same story from the first book, but maybe just from a different perspective, it still would've been better than what we got.

Getting into the actual story, Wade is a complete asshole, and not even a likable asshole. I borderline wanted him to fail. At no point in the story was I rooting for him to succeed. He's an entitled man-child who cyberstalks his ex. He can't take criticism and zeroes-out (kills) ☠️ the avatars of his detractors, which, overlooked in the book, is effectively ruining their livelihood. But it's not just Wade, nearly every character has been changed into shell of their former self.

Worst of all though is Ernest Cline's heavy-handed attempt to be "woke" by tackling gender and racial politics. In very identifiable tangents throughout the book, Cline goes out of his way talk about gender, sex, and race in ways that try to be sensitive and inclusive but end up coming off as annoying. Scenes will start out normal, then take a sharp left turn out of nowhere to talk about some woke agenda topic, then come right back to the scene like it never happen. These tangents are so noticeable and out of place that you almost come out of them confused in a "what-was-the-point-of-that?" kind of way 🤷‍♂️.

RP2 was clearly born off the success of the RP1 movie, but it isn't just a cash grab, it's an unnecessary cash grab. It's a book that didn't need to be written. RP1 deserved to remain a standalone novel, and the best thing you can do with Ready Player Two is pretend it doesn't exist 🚫.