English Dub Review: Chronos Ruler “Fact And Fiction”

Let’s do the time warp again.

Overview (Spoilers)

The team arrives in Victo’s hometown. He’s been gone since he was twelve, and… everything looks exactly the same! In fact, that right there is his mother and father. Their death was what made him leave, and they’re standing there alive! The newspaper tells them that somehow, the town is stuck in the past. Here, there is a young Victo, not more than five years old. Child prodigy, but a mean, nasty little whelp. The older Victo is drowning in his memories, but Kiri isn’t going to stop investigating this for one minute!

Courtesy: Funimation

The story of the episode was a bit circuitous, with Victo getting drawn in by his parents, and Kiri pulling him back. The entire time, Mina is sulking like a brat because she wants Victo’s attention, and he’s so focused on his psychotic, time-looped hometown. The logical one here, Kiri takes a bit of time to remind us that nothing here is making sense. Time doesn’t go backward, except when a Horolog eats a human’s time. That means that this town is the victim of a Horolog attack, but an effect of this size has never been encountered by Mina or the organization. My money is on that dude with the grungy hair that Victo’s dad was treating. His character design was way too dramatic to be a background character. He’s gotta be a bad guy. Speaking of “bad guy” Blaze spent three-quarters of the episode trying to figure out how old the young Victo would be, only to figure it out just as the tyke shows his ungrateful mug.

While it doesn’t come out and state it, this episode does reveal why Victo’s memories triggered from the kid in the last episode. Young Victo treats his parents like trash because they aren’t as smart as him. When they died in a fire, he realized how important they were to him, and how horrible he was to them. This is the same as Bill Raiden, who treated his parents as slaves until they died. His regrets were enough to make him take control of a horolog. So, of course, the wails of anguish Raiden let out echoed ones from Victo’s past. “But Marshall,” I hear you cry, “He can’t remember his past, he got ate by a time monster!” Two things. One: all of human memory is tied intrinsically to emotion. If your brain were a computer hard drive, emotions are like the File Allocation Table. Two: This show has no concept of how time works anyways. You really think they’re going to let a little thing like temporal physics get in the way of some easy storytelling shortcut like this?

Our Take

I like that this show is pushing ahead with a story that isn’t just a series of double fakes. This gives off more of a Twilight Zone vibe while taking the opportunity to build up its characters. The three Putins each get some time to express their feelings in this turn of events, and the effect that they’re having on Victo. He’s clearly off-kilter. He spends the majority of the episode with an unhinged, shocked look in his eyes. His confrontation with Kiri near the end of the episode was a little off as well. It feels as if his actions have a greater motivation than just nostalgia or redemption. However, the writer wants desperately to make a big reveal, so he keeps his stuff to himself. Even though it would make far more sense for him to let Kiri in on his secret so the two aren’t separated. As it is, one of them is going to run into a really bad horolog, and the rest of the team is off to the other. The creator of the comics this is based on is not an excellent writer, and he relies on big reveals instead of actual plot, forgetting that nobody in their right mind would act the way these characters act. He just wants to steamroll the story over everything and forces the characters to behave strangely to meet those ends.

I enjoyed the art in this episode. The town is charming and feels like a tiny village in Italy or France. Forget that Putin is a Russian name. Oh, and technically, that would make his wife’s name Mina Putina. Yeah, Russian names do that with gender. Sounds funny. Mina’s little aside about her take on the town has some really great art, even if the animation is almost non-existent. She has a dramatic look to her face, even as the camera smash-pans back. This would have been an amazing scene if… the voice acting for all of the characters weren’t. So. Flat. Even though there was a ton of complex emotions flying every which way, the voice actors kept on plugging along as if the characters were fine, dandy, and stable. Victo had one emotional tone for the episode, even though we should have been hearing him practically unhinged. Mina, in the scene before, had a face that said she was about to kill someone. Her tone said that someone stole her trapper keeper, and left a mean note in it about which boy she was taking to the dance. It was bratty, petty, and not at all how the character LOOKED emotionally. It was Kiri and Blaze actually sounded how they looked, which was pretty much the same emotion all episode, anyways.

This episode has all the makings of something compelling. It has dramatic art juxtaposed with idyllic, charming backgrounds. The story has tons of mystery and feels as if there are a ton of details you might miss if you don’t pay attention. Unfortunately, there isn’t much in the way of good animation, and the voice acting is flatter than a playing card. Oh, and a bit of a note, Project No. 9 Studio? It’s spelled “Butler” not “Buttller”. Not to be a spellcheck nazi, but that kinda bugged me. It didn’t really bring the score down much, as I give this episode seven of Blaze’s counting fingers out of ten.

But seriously, It took Blaze two days to do that math problem?

SCORE
7.0/10