YMMV / Ready Player Two

• Anti-Climax Boss: Sorrento is dispatched at the climax with an offhand headshot from Anorak, denying us any payoff from two separate books. Wade then easily steamrolls Sorrento's telebots, removing the only other threat they presented.
• Anvilicious: Once again, Wade takes the chance to spout off on another perceived technological evil, this time, social media.
• Continuity Lockout: Sorrento's comment about wanting to destroy the OASIS (when as far as anyone in the first book knew he just wanted to make money off of it) only makes sense if you've read Andy Weir's short story Lacero^note Confirmed as canon by Word of God, which explains Sorrento's entire motivation in the first book was to destroy the OASIS as his sister was a Gunter who died from a drug overdose.
• Designated Hero: Wade, moreso than in the first novel. First, he decides to release the ONI, despite knowing full-well about the world's already-crippling reliance on the OASIS. Then, he decides to funnel enough money to pay off the debts of most countries into a project designed to send a mere twelve people into space to colonise another planet instead of concentrating his new wealth and power on trying to improve the grim situation on Earth first. He completely ignores Samantha's criticism of this and acts self-righteous about what he's doing the whole time, despite the fact that Samantha is ultimately right in her criticisms of him and what he's doing. This leads to Samantha dumping him for a while. He does get better as the book goes on, but the arrogance he displays throughout most of the story can make it hard to root for him. And that’s not including how he cyberstalks Samantha and sues Tapioca Shindig, a band that used a sound-byte of him in their first single, for defamation. ^note He even openly admits that he bankrupted all of them Or that he uses his superadmin powers to identify online trolls who mock or insult him and his friends (and ex) so he can kill their avatars, which is established in the first book as potentially ruinous due to resetting the character to level 1 and causing a loss of virtual items that have actual value. Ultimately, Wade comes off as a creepy, irresponsible and immature egomaniac with way too much power.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Though the story implies a happy ending where a virtual time capsule of all things about humanity (including digital copies of people) is sent out to space and it's implied that Wade and the remaining members of the High Five have started having families, there's no indication that the problems that were plaguing the world have been solved. Since those problems are briefly swept over and then never addressed again, it's implied that the world is still approaching its death and the extinction of humanity (including the generations that are coming after the Vonnegut has left with the digital copies of all humans) is just around the corner.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • With L0hengrin's help, Wade finds the first shard in Kira's high school bedroom in Middletown by playing a mix tape on her boom box. The shard emerges when The Smiths' "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" plays. When Wade and L0hengrin find the bedroom, it's the only building on the entire street where the lights are on.
  • Though one of the common details about the artists Halliday uses for the shard quest are all portrayed as flawed (for example, Prince shunning homosexuals after years of being a sexual icon, John Hughes' lack of ethnic characters in his works), a bulk of those who are used (including Og and Kira themselves) have another common detail: they had difficulty in their creative fields due to Executive Meddling.
    • The Smiths had issues with the American distributor Sire Records, who not only changed the sleeve for their U.S. release of their single "How Soon Is Now?", but also cobbled together a music video for the song without the band's involvement.
    • For Prince, he had issues with Warner Brothers and tried to produce as many albums as possible in such a short time in order to get out of his contract (and even changing his name, briefly, to his iconic symbol because he felt his name was no longer his and was a product of Warner Brothers).
    • John Hughes had issues with the studio interfering with Pretty in Pink and forced him to change the original ending he had intended (and ended up reusing for Some Kind of Wonderful), as well as them rejecting his original casting choice of Robert Downey Jr. for the role of Ducky (which was mentioned directly in the book), which eventually lead him to no longer direct and become strictly a writer until finally falling out with Hollywood and retiring.
    • Rieko Kodama, the creator of The Ninja/Sega Ninja, would have had face difficulties with being in a field that was predominated by men in a society in a time where women didn't have as much freedom as men do (basically the Glass Ceiling issue), in addition to the changes made to the game for U.S. release.
    • J.R.R. Tolkien had Executive Meddling issues with The Lord of the Rings after The Hobbit was released, which resulted in the creation of The Silmarillion and a re-edit of The Hobbit.
    • Og and Kira, the only fictional people in the shard quest, had creative difficulties with James Halliday, who had been presented in the first novel as being extremely difficult and firing people for not getting obscure 80s references, in addition to the personal difficulties they had with their friend for a majority of their lives.
  • People have considered Halliday in the story as being flawed and deeply disturbed individual due to how the Anorak A.I. is presented. However, many people forget that Halliday attempted to remove the aspects of his personality that he felt were unfavorable from the A.I. copy of his entire mind and tried to substitute programming to reinforce the changes in an attempt to make a better and normal version of himself. Though he is flawed and makes some rather huge mistakes (such as copying Karen's mind without her permission and trying to get it to fall for him is a great example of this), he realizes afterwards that they are mistakes and tries to correct them (which he does by offering the A.I. Karen the option to be deleted). The Anorak A.I. is what Halliday would be without the aspects that made him benevolent, basically being the darker version of Halliday if he hadn't the aspects that made him who he was.
  • Kurt Vonnegut has wrote a novel about a dying Earth sending out a Seed Ship shilw ignoring its own problems back in 1972.
• Fridge Horror: The fact that Shoto's wife had a digital copy carries some unsettling undertones. Imagine you're a woman eight months pregnant. Now imagine that suddenly, you're a digital copy of yourself and you will never have that baby you've been carrying. You'll never meet that baby you've been carrying. But you know it exists, that it was born, and you will get pictures of it, but it isn't yours. You just suddenly stopped being pregnant and have no choice but to watch your doppelganger have your child.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Many fans, while still entertained by the book, were somewhat disappointed that the thrust of the main story is yet another 80's-based easter egg hunt throughout the OASIS. Many of the book's detractors hate it for the same reason, adding that Cline's obsession with 80's pop culture reaches almost exhaustive levels throughout the book (particularly with the Shermer, Illinois sequence).
• Improved Second Attempt:
  • Including a trans character and Wade being explicitly more comfortable with the Q+ part of the spectrum is generally seen as the author trying to walk back some of the lines from the book that came across as transphobic.
  • Similarly, centering a segment of the hunt around Prince and having Aech raise concern about Lord Of The Rings's lack of non-white protagonists may have been an attempt by Cline to address criticisms that his first book skipped over black culture from the 80s. However, some of the more awkward ways this is accomplished, such as Aech's charity being called the "Wakandan Outreach Initiative," diminish the effectiveness of these attempts to be inclusive.
• Karmic Overkill: Tapioca Shindig didn't have entirely clean hands, but Wade going out of his way to bankrupt them and destroy their lives is a near-masturbatory level of "Why the hell do you care so much?"
• Narm: The sequence set on the Prince planet requires such a near-obsessive level of knowledge of Prince to understand that it's essentially a distillation of Cline's "Look how smart I am!" problem boiled down into a handful of pages (especially since he gets several things dead wrong). It's hilarious for exactly the wrong reasons.
• Padding: There are four chapters in a row set on a planet dedicated to John Hughes movies for no plot-relevant reason.
• Sequelitis: Even among Fans who otherwise enjoyed the novel tend to admit it’s not as good as the first book. This is due to a slew of problems, most notably Wade and co becoming less sympathetic protagonists, the plot being a repeat of the first one's and overall lower stakes.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Some fans felt that L0hengrin, who's set up as an enthusiastic, whip-smart protege to Wade, should have played a bigger role in the story, especially considering that her biggest contribution to the finale - retrieving the Dorkslayer sword, a quest so difficult that she's the only member of the L0w Five to survive finding it - was simply relegated to an Offscreen Moment of Awesome.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: There's a lot of meat that could have been gleaned from the idea of rogue AI avatars running amok inside the OASIS, along with the entire plot element of the ONI being capable of recreating a user's consciousness after death. While the book dips into these ideas on a thematic level, they're mostly used as window-dressing for yet another Easter Egg hunt.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Samantha is meant to be seen in the wrong for breaking up with Wade over several of his decisions in the book. However, her criticisms about releasing the ONI despite the world's dependence on the OASIS and using a large sum of money that could be used to help most of thee world to fund a space expedition with twelve people to conquer a planet are very valid and can be seen as right for dumping Wade.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Tapioca Shindig can be seen as this, as they used the sound byte of Wade's promise to split his shares with the other members of the High Five and edited it to make it sound like he was a bad guy, because they sided with a vocal minority who felt that Wade and the remaining members of the High Five had become the very thing they fought against in the first place.
  • Wade throughout the book is shown to be possessive or dismissive of other people's feelings and attention as well as willing to invade others' privacy and unjustly attack them over small petty arguments with vindictive glee. Due to him being the protagonist, we're treated to his Sympathetic P.O.V.. In the first book, he does have his jerk-ish moments but does ultimately mature into a good person. Here he abuses his extremely privileged position as head of the OASIS to get whatever he wants regardless of the feelings and safety of others, which is especially made clear after he recounts what he's been doing with his new powers and what he said to Samantha that made them break up for a good portion of the book. While the book ultimately ends with Wade softening up and becoming more empathetic, it's still hard to call him a decent, nevermind good, person with some of his actions, which it never says he'd fully turn from.

---