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Dragon’s Dogma II, Capcom’s sequel to its cult role-playing game, is coming out on Thursday, but is somehow already embroiled in one of the funniest and dumbest controversies I’ve ever seen.
Like many RPGs, Dragon’s Dogma II features a robust character creator that allows players to modify their avatar in great detail. Like many other character creators, it has a sliding scale for height, but in Dragon’s Dogma II this sliding scale only goes as short as 160 centimeters (5 feet and 3 inches). This, in the eyes of some people, is a big problem, and a huge subject of discussion online, where people are arguing that not allowing players to create shorter characters is discriminating against short people, or that Capcom is preventing players from creating short characters because it’s “woke” and afraid of allowing player characters that look like children.
“Woke and Censored Games Alert,” a Steam curator page that aims to “notify you about games that have woke and/or censored content,” flags the height issue. “The game doesn't let you create your character to be shorter than 160 cm. The average height for Japanese women is 154.1 cm. This is likely to prevent people from creating young characters,” the page says, and links to a Steam Discussions thread about the issue.
The 690 posts-long thread itself is one of the more astounding artifacts of online discourse I’ve encountered in my over two decades as an online gaming goblin, oscillating from substantive arguments about RPG character archetypes and accusations of pedophilia and “woke subversion.”