For a gamer who chafes under time constraints in games, sandbox titles are the purest form of enjoyment. Morrowind, Skyrim, Minecraft, Fallout, Sim City… these suck absolute hours out of the gaming schedule, without actually achieving much, which is strange because…

I have never “finished” an Animal Crossing Title.

A strange amalgam of The Sims, Minecraft, Sim City and Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing defied virtually all attempts at genre pigeon-holing when it was first released in the US on the 12th of September. Here was a game virtually about nothing, that tied you to a very specific real-world day/night cycle – when it’s 12pm in your miserable life, it’s 12pm in the happy world of the game. This simplicity was practically the driving force behind the game, with players rushing home after work/school/lectures to get in those precious hours that they have missed during the dullardry of their day.

Seasons came and went, with Autumn bringing golden leaves, Winter with its snow-covered trees, blossoms in Spring and the hearty calls of cicadas throughout the Summer months.

With these changes of seasons came a change in the types of insect and fish that were available to fill out your museum: some only came out at night, or during a rainstorm. Others were unique to specific days of the year or parts of the geography such as the rivers, lakes and ponds that dotted the landscape of your town. The specifics of these collectibles were the subject of many late nights, early mornings and days at the weekend spent in pursuit of the last specimen to round out that collection. The only real pressure on the player was finding the time to hunt them down and of course, the inexorable passing of time.

Hard to find also were the furniture sets used to decorate your home: certain towns were predisposed towards a particular range of furniture sets – the Lovely, Modern, Cabin and Ranch Series were particular stand-outs in the memory. The fact that these furniture sets randomly appeared in the local store made them all the more valuable, and I can recall shaking down every fruit tree possible to get enough Bells (the in-game currency) to buy that elusive Lovely Lamp for a friend of mine, then sending her the code to receive it in her game.

But as is the way in life – as marriages settle into comfortable tedium; work becomes a mindless series of repetitive tasks, so too the excitement of a new games wears off with time. Being the obsessive collector I am, I still managed to stay with the game much longer than most. Nevertheless, I turned off the game for the last time without fully collecting everything that I had set out to put in my museum and decorate my home with.

Wild World, City Folk and New Leaf have all come and gone with the passing of time, and each iteration has brought with it a new level of sustained interest as the in-game features and events are tweaked to permit further customisation of your town and its inhabitants. The collectibles, naturally, remained at heart of the experience and the new games expanded on the fossils, bugs, fish and furniture that can be found in the game world. But as time has worn on, so too has my interest in doing EVERYTHING that the games have to offer. In fact for the first time, I failed to complete even the fossil collection in New Leaf, which is usually the first museum wing to be filled as fossils are available every day of the year, albeit generated randomly.

Do I feel that the game was somehow less for this incomplete state in which it was left? Yes and no.

Regardless, I kept playing the game for 18 months, buoyed as I was by the regular visits of my little sister from England on a Sunday night. It was truly a wonderful way to connect with family whom I could not see every day, and the ease of connection was a real breath of fresh air for someone who had suffered through the early days of the internet, and, more specifically, Nintendo internet. Great also was the StreetPass feature, which matched me rather surprisingly with a number of Japanese and American players as I sat idle on the Shanghai Metro. That little flashing light after a long day was a thrill to see, even if it only meant that I could see their sometimes strangely-decorated homes.

18 months of sustained interest is a good stretch for virtually any game in modern times, with most titles offering a sigh-inducing “8-10 hours of gameplay!” (sic). But the fact that I invested so much time in my town without really seeing it all, does bring a feeling of regret into my battered old heart. Part of me wants desperately to return to Noonvale, and yet somehow the time for reconciliation and completion has somehow passed.