Excel Saga

Working for a secret organization called ACROSS, Excel is part of a grand plan for world domination that starts with conquering a single city — Fukuoka. Her boss, the dramatic and self-serious Il Palazzo, delivers missions from a throne. Excel herself is a manic, borderline unstable True Believer who will do absolutely anything for the cause. Her partner Hyatt has a habit of dying. Repeatedly. And then coming back. That's the setup, and the show uses it as a launchpad to parody basically every anime genre imaginable — one episode is a shonen battle show, the next is a hard-boiled action film, the next is something you can barely describe. The actual director, Nabeshin, appears as a character in his own series, which tells you the level of self-aware chaos you're getting into. It shares DNA with FLCL in the sense that both are aggressively weird products of the late '90s that feel like they were made by people with zero interest in playing it straight. If Pop Team Epic's rapid-fire absurdism appeals to you, Excel Saga is essentially the longer-form ancestor of that energy. The 26-episode TV series from J.C.Staff does not hold your hand, does not slow down, and the final episode was deliberately made unbroadcastable by breaking every content guideline the studio could find. That last detail should tell you whether this is for you.