Ratchet and clank a crack in time the great clock

At Zanifar Ratchet only interacted with a few people and destroyed a few robots, and failed to do anything noteworthy.

This bugged me too, though I have some theories.

Also, there is no indication that Ratchet and Clank forget about having fought in the battle, so presumably they wouldn't have forgotten about meeting each other like Azimuth suggested. Why didn't they tell Azimuth he could use that? I know it could be argued that they just decided they didn't want to mess with the timeline, but when they went to the battle of Gimlick Valley, they did it purely out of convenience, because they needed a new space ship.

This doesn't change the fact that they had an efficient and apparently safe way of traveling through time and alter history with no ill consequences.

The only time that the Great Clock is used by anyone is when Clank goes back to save Ratchet's life - but that was only by a few minutes, and he did it based on the Plumber's hint, so no harm was done.

When Ratchet and Clank went back in time to the Battle of Gimlick Valley, they were not using the Great Clock, or reversing time - they traveled through cracks in space/time to reach the past/future. Azimuth wanted to reverse time for the entire universe by at least 20 years - considering that the Great Clock exists to hold the fabric of space/time together, this would be cataclysmic for the universe.

I think it's got more to do with using the Great Clock in such a way - as said repeatedly by Orvus, the Great Clock isn't a time machine, it's simply the universe's internal clock.

So why couldn't they allow Azimuth to do the same to help the Lombaxes? But Ratchet and Clank do use the Great Clock to travel in time on multiple occasions and even alter history significantly by helping the Fongoids win the battle of Gimlick Valley, with no negative side effects.

In A Crack in Time, Ratchet won't let Azimuth use the Great Clock to alter history and prevent Tachyon from destroying the Lombaxes because it could potentially destroy the universe and because it wasn't meant to alter time, only keep it.

Ratchet and clank a crack in time the great clock