Excel Saga as an anime is hard to describe; besides the "zany" and "random" epithets it's also just an experiment in questioning what an adaptation can do insofar as it still evokes the spirit of its material. As far as I can tell Rikdo did not really mind the fact that the show took such a strange direction; in the sidebars of the manga, he seems pleased to hear the seiyuu, he seems to incorporate some of the anime-only characters and so tie the canon a bit closer together. That said, Excel Saga the manga is trying to do something very different than the show is.

I've heard people describe the manga as a more cynical and sardonic take on everyday life in Fukuoka. Sure, it has that element in it. The tone it takes toward the world is not quite nihilistic, but arbitrary, as though grand forces exist in a cosmic battle that take up and employ people who really just want to get on with life, and so have a detached take from the supposed "grand scale" battles going on.

It's the relationship between the cosmic forces that the series really focuses on over the volumes. The premise of the story resets: here we are! Hail Il Palazzo! Time to do a mission! And it always ends up going into a bizarre direction, spinning out of control before having to reset itself yet again and try to maintain its sense of purpose; alone, a side grows restless and loses any meaning at all. By actually witnessing each other (Kabapu vs. Palazzo,

Spoiler, click to view

even the "two cores" as the story goes on

), suddenly there's motivation! Time to get back to work!

Why else can there be this endless array of characters losing their memory, finding new identities, trying another one on for a few volumes, gaining and then losing and then gaining their sense of meaning, before being reanimated yet again by purpose? Insofar as the forces need you, you will lose who you are, temporarily be other people, present as this or that being, then be recalled, and not really recall why you did any of it. And even the forces themselves grow kind of bored playing with each other.

I suppose that is, after all, the most cynical part.

The past two volumes really up the ante in this respect.

Spoiler, click to view

After so much back and forth (in ways that I found endearing in the girls and absolutely hilarious with the city employees), we suddenly pull the veil and see that there's even more people involved in the mix than we imagined, and that they themselves were called into action to help the mayor feel happy. The girls are either the actual children of "the universe" or an artificial creation or a homunculus (leaving Elgala as the one who seems to just be a naive human in the mix). Iwata is not a cyborg but remote controlling robot bodies, sometimes missing the mark and piloting other robots or sometimes losing signal and having "something else" step into his robot. ACROSS wins but it ultimately doesn't do anything. Life proceeds as the revolution is a temporary orgasmic fit.

I'm not sure what to make of other people who make it all the way through this series and love it as I ended up doing.

Spoiler, click to view

I was caught off guard by just how much it involved identity manipulation and supernatural entities.

It asks so much of you in accepting its view of the world, but in return it gives you something both hilarious and then actually moving, if you stick with it.