These discs have an unusual but crucial feature: a series of Pop-Up Video-style blurbs which point out specific parodies, puns, references and so forth. They're harder to use than they should be—the menu design makes it difficult to tell when they're on—but they're crucial for complete comprehension of the jokes, which flash by at a rate of about one per second. Ready access to a pause button is similarly crucial: visual gags pop up and disappear rapidly, Excel talks at Warp 10, and it's fairly common for two people to speak rapidly and simultaneously while a text joke appears in the background. The subtitles are critical, both because they make it easier to sort everything out, and because the English audio track is utterly excruciating. Dub fans, consider yourself warned: Excel Saga is extremely funny, but anyone who can't handle subtitles or two straight hours of high-pitched, harsh shrieking should give it a wide berth.

Even with the pop-up explanations, longtime anime fans will still probably get the most out of Excel Saga. Each episode parodies a different anime genre: science fiction, romantic comedy, sports saga, horror, magical-girl story, etc. When the series isn't referring to other series, it's referring to itself: In the first episode, Ilpallazo waves a copy of an Excel Saga book set at Excel, then shreds it to prove a point. In episode five, when he throws Excel into a near-bottomless pit, she spends part of her lengthy fall apologizing to readers of the original manga for not featuring the pit in earlier episodes. Again, this sort of nonsense is just par for the course.

And Excel Saga's total commitment to chaos is most of what makes the series work. Unlike other, more sedate anime parodies like Otaku No Video and Shinesman, or other hyper, goofy series like Martian Successor Nadesico, Excel Saga isn't afraid to go way, way overboard. Utterly unpredictable, recklessly paced, and miles over the top, Excel Saga demands complete attention, leaving viewers with no breath for critical analysis or narrative skepticism.