Reception
Since its August 2003 release in North America, the manga has been among the 50 top-selling graphic novels on three occasions.
The English-language reviews of the Excel Saga anime were broadly positive and enthusiastic. Mike Crandol of Anime News Network puts it in the same class as Airplane!, National Lampoon, Tex Avery, and Monty Python, adding that the "combination of character-based humor, outrageous slapstick farce, and a plot that is engaging if only for how weird it is make for a thoroughly enjoyable comedic experience". A contrary opinion is expressed by Joel Pearce from DVD Verdict, who says the series is "occasionally clever and funny," but that "much of it is gratingly obnoxious". Many reviewers express displeasure with middle and later episodes, saying they were "more of the same," that they had stale humor, that they were tiresome, or even painfully unfunny. Episodes fourteen through sixteen, starring the Ropponmatsus, bear the brunt of this criticism, but several reviewers consider episode seventeen, Animation USA, to be one of the best.
Reviewers also agree that the series suffers from too much filler in its later episodes, with Crandol describing the show as spinning its wheels. Yegulalp reserves his harshest words for the unaired Going Too Far, calling it "pure, idiotic, wretched excess." He goes on to say that the episode has "the feeling of trying to deliberately enrage the audience by resorting to the only tactics left: genuinely offensive subject matter." Joel Cunningham at Digitally Obsessed disagrees, saying that the episode succeeds just in time, "with one of the series' funnier sight gags".
The series generally receives high marks for technical aspects. Cunningham feels the animation is flat-out gorgeous, but Crandol considers it merely above average. In the latter's opinion, its quality wanes as the series progresses and increasingly relies on super-deforming the characters for comedic effect. ADV's release earned praise for the quality of the video transfer and the DVD extras (particularly the Vid-Notes). Reviewers especially appreciated the English voice acting: Crandol calls it brilliant, and several note that Calvello and Wolcott were each able to capture Mitsuishi's Excel. Pearce, in contrast, found the English cast to be pretty bad and its Excel to be dental drill shrill.
Akadot's reviewer of the manga writes that "some of the strange events go on a little too long and do not have the impact that they do animated," but that Rikdo's Excel Saga is "graced with fantastic visuals and a hilarious story," and that the English edition is "a masterpiece of the translator's skill." Barb Lien-Cooper from Comic World News concurs that the manga cannot keep pace with the anime, but she finds Excel herself to be wittier in the manga and that the manga's plots make more sense than the anime's. A reviewer of the French edition also praises Rikdo's work, noting that it is an "...easy read without problems of clarity."
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