Brett Damon's Reviews > Ready Player Two

** spoiler alert ** I don't write many reviews because I'm really not qualified to be a reviewer. I like to read what I like to read, I rarely overthink it, I don't try to critique the artwork an author has dedicated months of their lives to create because I'm sure they'd do a far better job than I ever could. So when I review something, I have a strong opinion.

Yes I enjoyed Ready Player One, and I recognise that if you're going to follow that up then you better have something bigger to offer. Ready Player Two was 366 pages of missed opportunities. What it needed to do was to jump the shark, shake things up, go big or go home. It did not do this.

It's set in a post apocalyptic world. Wade finds that his predecessor had created some new technology. We find that Wade is using his fortune to build a spaceship to escape from a dying earth. Suddenly, a new treasure hunt miraculously starts - Wade doesn't seem to care about it or what the goal might be. Why would he? He's rich as Croesus and wants off this desolate hellhole anyway. The story could have been an eco-warrior novel where Wade needed to find treasures in the real world, thus realising Samantha was right all along and we should be trying to repair the planet we have. This book could have been the woke novel that Cline seems to be angling towards but no, Wade insists on living inside his VR world and in the end sends a copy of his memories and personality off towards a potential life-supporting planet. Complete missed opportunity to preach to me about saving the planet and halting climate change and appreciating the planet we've got while we've got it, and how much better the real world is than the virtual world - I'd have gobbled that up, but no. Rats from a sinking ship. Got it.

The novel could've done with some foreshadowing. It isn't until we're on Tolkien world that we discover Wade has personal issues with Tolkien because Samantha was a huge Tolkien fan? But we know Wade has been practicing to play a real guitar, and it was mentioned in passing on Prince world but never comes up at all? And the Dorkslayer just gets mentioned halfway through, like "oh this is a thing, might be useful, we should go find it." Maybe foreshadow that too? Wade somehow comes across it, he finds it somewhere, Og leaves it behind, anything. Like that Extra Life coin that Wade got from a perfect Pacman game, set it up early to have it pay off later. There was none of that. Missed opportunity.

Otherwise, the treasure hunt felt like more of the same. I get that Cline knows we loved the first book, and the first book had a treasure hunt through 80s memorabilia, but maybe we just liked it because it was well done? We don't need to relive it. We can read a new story in the same world and it doesn't need a treasure hunt to keep us entertained. We don't need to encounter all the same characters again either, the insertion of Sorrento felt really contrived and unnecessary.

I have an inconsistent rating system. I could have given this one star for disappointing me so much. I could've given it three stars for at least setting up a story set in the same world. But I'm giving it two stars, for all the missed opportunities to actually make a bigger and better story in lieu of just doing it all over again.