Final Fantasy 10 Turns 25, Plus This Week's Cozy Game Picks

This week’s rotation ranges from small, calming management play to long RPG revisits, with one clear milestone in the middle: Final Fantasy 10 has turned 25. Alongside that anniversary, the current stack includes a thrift shop sim built for short breaks, a fresh wander through Dragon’s Dogma 2, and a late but enthusiastic start to Dredge, the fishing game that turns cozy routine into maritime unease.

One of the most interesting picks this week is a shop management game built around running a thrift store. Its strongest first impression comes from the art direction, with bright, messy-looking color combinations that still hold together once the store starts filling out. The appeal is not only in placing items on shelves, but in the smaller decisions around stock flow and layout.

Keeping the store running means ordering products, sorting them in ways customers can understand, and paying attention to how one category connects to another. Crafting items need to sit with crafting items, themed shelves need support from the right purchases, and there are extra layers through requests and in-store events. That structure gives the game more to do than its gentle look first suggests. It also sounds like the kind of game that works best in short sessions, when there are only a few minutes free and the goal is to settle into something low-pressure without turning the brain off entirely.

Elsewhere, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is back in the weekly mix, and the focus is not on finishing quests quickly. It is on inhabiting the world. That feels like the right way to approach Capcom’s RPG, which still does its best work in travel, chance encounters, and the friction of getting from one place to another.

The current run is built around completionist goals, collecting armor, weapons, seeker tokens, and golden beetles, while pouring money into favored upgrades. That kind of checklist could sound dry in another game, but Dragon’s Dogma 2 keeps finding ways to make the in-between memorable. Oxcart rides, long treks across the map, and the odd decision to recruit a pawn chasing a Chimera all feed into the sense that the journey matters more than the objective marker. Even with fast travel options available, the road remains the more rewarding choice.

The biggest landmark this week is Final Fantasy 10 hitting its 25th anniversary. It originally launched on July 19, 2001, and a return trip through the HD Remaster is a reminder of how specific its strengths still feel. Spira remains one of the most fully realized settings in the series, both welcoming and threatening, with a constant undertow of grief beneath its tropical surface. The game’s central ideas about faith, ritual, sacrifice, and doomed romance still give it unusual weight among big-budget RPGs of its era.

Replaying it with modern convenience features, including speed options and progression boosters, changes the pacing without flattening the design. In some ways, pushing harder against the Sphere Grid early only makes the original battle balance stand out more clearly. It also helps smooth over some of the slower sections while leaving the world itself intact, from the Mi'ihen Highroad to the Calm Lands. Not every part of the remaster has aged gracefully, especially some of the visual changes, but the underlying game clearly has.

Then there is Dredge, which continues to make a strong case for itself as one of the better recent hybrids of cozy structure and horror atmosphere. A few hours in is enough to see why it has such a hold on players who like both fishing systems and unsettling mood. Its trick is simple: take the familiar loop of heading out, catching fish, managing cargo, and returning to port, then let dread seep into every corner of it. That contrast is what makes it work, and it remains distinctive even for players arriving late.