English Dub Review: Chronos Ruler “Conjectures and Refutations”

The greasy-haired man reveals his true colors.

Overview (Spoilers)

While Victo recovers at an abandoned cottage, the rest of the team investigate the outer boundaries of the time dilation field. They realize that the earlier contact with the horolog wasn’t an attack, but a way of saying “Hello, we’re watching you.” The horologs are guarding the town, but why? That’s when they come under attack by two men. One uses a wakazashi and controls the snake horolog. The other is an old martial artist that reminds me of Gen from Street Fighter. However, the sword-user seems to know Mina, and when he refers to her as Nana, she starts to get scary. She tells Kiri to go on and protect Victo, but really, it’s to keep Kiri from hearing her hidden secrets. Back with Victo, the man with the long, black, greasy looking hair shows up. He begins to question Victo as to his feelings and emotions, and why he hit little Victo. That’s when Bill Raiden shows up, begging the man for a new ring. The man transforms, revealing himself to be an incredibly powerful horolog. He has been eating the time of the entire town, but only one day each time. Each time, he’s done different things, experimenting with the populous. He also admits to being the same horolog that ate Victo’s time. The two fight, but Victo is no match for him. The horolog is about to eat him when Kiri arrives to put the kibosh on the whole reunion.

I told you he was up to no good. He is rather forthcoming with this information, though, and we learn a bit more about horologs in the process. The reason they start taking on more refined forms as they eat more time is due to the memories they consume as they do so. Eating up that many disparate memories cause those thoughts to aggregate into an ego of its own, much like how the hollows of Bleach eat enough of each other and turn into menos grandes. This starts with them becoming larger, then taking on animal forms, until they finally begin to take on human forms. Once they begin to get beyond the pale in power, they can even have multiple bodies and shapeshift at will. Nightmarish! Further, he reveals that there is a limit to how much time they can consume before properly digesting it, and if the “organ” they use to eat time is damaged, all the missing time flies out. This horolog seems to be working with many humans, some of which control horologs. They all work for a shadowy master they call “His Majesty”. This isn’t the first we’ve heard of him either, as they mentioned their master in episode two.

Also interesting is Mina’s reaction to this man. He seems to know her, but describes Kiri and Nana’s relationship. She gets a scary look on her face, scarier than we’ve ever seen from her before. From her reactions, it seems like he may be on the money. This leads to some pretty wild conjectures. If she isn’t Nana, as she asserts, is it possible that there is even more to the story? Could she have been responsible for Nana’s death? If she is Nana, did giving birth to Kiri cause her to become a normal human? Then, when she was bitten by the horolog, it rewound her as far as it could until it reached a point where she was physically immune to having her time consumed. That turned her back into a goddess. But why did she use another name if that were the case? Further, she remembers all of this enough to get her scary look, so that means her time couldn’t have been consumed. I know nothing of what is going on!

Our Take

And this time, I have to say, I enjoy that. Where the previous story arc left me with no clue because it was relying on cheap double fakes that popped up twice an episode, here, I have no clue because of all the possibilities. The plot has taken a steep uptick in this arc. Everything is shrouded in so much mystery, you don’t have enough pieces to put together. Even as we have started to put some of the secrets in place, new mysteries pop up. However, as Bill’s (temporary) return shows, they are no longer wasting any plot points. As the remaining three episodes play out, we are likely going to get more clues. Is it possible that somewhere, someone gave Jea Pon the same advice I did? Did he… read a book? The plot has skyrocketed in quality since the last arc, and I am thoroughly hooked.

I really wish I could say good things about the animation. At least, I don’t have much bad to say about it. Other than a few spots where they obviously cycled a bunch of frames, the animation was respectable. What really got my attention was the art. The big horolog (named Aiks, as I’ve found) was truly disturbing as he morphed his monster head out. Also, Mina. Wow. I didn’t think she could look like that. It was dramatic, and I was hoping we’d get to see her go all out. Alas, next episode it seems. The action in the episode wasn’t poorly animated, but after the display, they made in the first episode, I would hope for some more.

For most of the characters in this episode, the voice acting was one-note. Blaze, the old dude, the sword guy, and even Aiks didn’t really portray much emotion. I would have thought Blaze would have been good for that. However, we do have two very different performances from major characters. Jad Saxton as Mina had a subtle but palpable shift in her tone once it became obvious the dude knew her secret. She didn’t become a growly demon or a shrieky harpy. It was a small change, slightly deeper, slightly raspier. It sounded perfect for the visuals. Then, we look at Victo, who should have portrayed a wide array of emotional levels as he goes from rest to curiosity, to alarm, to anger. Unfortunately, we get next to none of those from his voice actor, Jerry Jewell. The most we get is “determination” when he moves in for a big (and ultimately futile) attack on Aiks. This isn’t enough to ruin the episode for me, but he’s the one sitting in on the villain revealing his plot. He should exhibit a bit more feels!

I like how the series has built a good plot behind itself and is getting better at telling its story. What few actual issues the episode has in its voice acting is leveled out with good performances from other actors, and the animation is still light years better than The Reflection.