Novel Viz Media was awarded the
Batchelder Award in 2008 for publishing
Brave Story novel. Matt Paddock from Game Vortex ponders on the "family dynamics and the pain of divorce or marital dysfunction is still so great in Japan that readers there are transfixed by this kind of stuff." He criticizes Miyabe for not introducing the "fantasy world much earlier to capture the imagination of her readers". Katherine Dacey of
Pop Culture Shock describes "Miyabe’s dark fantasy" as "a Frankenbook, stitched together from pieces of
EverQuest,
Guin Saga,
Harry Potter,
The Lord of the Rings,
Star Wars, and
The Wizard of Oz to create an entertaining, surprisingly adult adventure story whose seams sometime show."
Film The
Brave Story film was nominated for "Animation of the Year" at the 2007
Japanese Academy Awards. John Li from MovieXclusive commends the film for its animation, saying "pleasing soft pastel colors and the occasional computer animation is still refreshing and pleasant to look at". Mark Schilling of
The Japan Times compares Wataru to
Doraemon's Nobita. He compares "the "quest for five jewels" motif" to the
Dragon Ball series and
The Chronicles of Narnia. John Smith from Impuse Gamer commends the film for its "beautiful animation techniques and some great sound sequences". Mania.com's Chris Beveridge commends the
Blu-ray Disc version of
Brave Story for being "very expansive in its use of the surround channels during some of the action sequences". He also commends the film for its visual quality saying, "on our 50" set at 720p, the only "problems" I could find was that I had to be six inches (152 mm) from the screen and looking at the pixels to see some of the shiftiness in the animation in the scenes where dark blues and blacks mix". Mania.com's Dani Moure compares the film's "old-fashioned" character designs to
Studio Ghibli's. Anime News Network's Brian Hanson criticises the film as "being one of the worst-looking big-budget anime films of recent memory, the story is a mash of bizarre coincidences held together haphazardly by forced and annoying bouts of exposition, with irritating and one-dimensional characters chirping throughout". Erkael of the French website
Manga News gave the anime film 18 out of 20, and describes it as "
Brave Story is a real phenomenon in Japan, in addition to the film which required more than four long years of work, This superb film, from the Gonzo studio, in itself is a guarantee of quality. The quest for sacred gems is only a pretext to explore this vast world and develop the character who will become aware of the suffering of others once he has stopped focusing on his own. Indeed the film is deeper than it seems, it goes beyond a simple Heroic Fantasy adventure, it encourages reflection and knows how to be very touching on many occasions. In short, this film is a masterpiece to own, it is already a great classic!".
Manga The Manga adaption of
Brave Story was ranked fifth on an
About.com poll for the best shōnen manga of 2007. A.E. Sparrow from
IGN commends
Brave Story manga for
Yochiro Ono's artwork and he compares them to "some of the more recent
manhwa (Korean) titles that have also come out of the
Tokyopop camp". Mania.com's Nadia Oxford comments that the " unforgiving landscape" of the
fantasy world "Vision" "seems to somehow reflect the mental state of its inhabitants". Scott Campbell from ActiveAnime commends the manga for its "detailed art and involving story". Snow Wildsmith from Teenreads commends Miyabe's "talent for switching between reality and fantasy, action and pathos, humor and seriousness, which helps make her story both more interesting and more believable".
Anime News Network's Carlo Santos criticises the manga for its opening plotline by saying it is a "remarkably bland rendition of the "young hero sucked into alternate world" formula, and it's easy to mistake this at first for some kind of lame-duck
Rayearth /
Twelve Kingdoms clone". Katherine Dacey of Pop Culture Shock comments on
Brave Story "distinguishes itself from dozens of similar series by fleshing out Wataru’s personal life. Wataru is no swaggering shonen stereotype: he’s insecure, hesitant, and crushed to learn that his dream girl has the hots for someone else." She also commends Wataru's parents sudden divorce "leaving Wataru to comfort his dumbfounded and grief-stricken mother while coming to terms with his own sense of loss. These scenes add an unexpected emotional depth to the story, demonstrating Wataru’s essential decency while providing him with a powerful motive for saving the world: he loves his mother".
Games Brave Story: New Traveler was generally well received by critics earning aggregated scores of 76% from
Metacritic and 79% from
GameRankings. Joe Dodson of
GameSpot commends the game for its visual and
sound effects but criticises its "homogenous and never-ending" monsters.
GamePro commends the game for "vibrant graphics, small load times and solid presentation on the whole" but criticises it for "some too-familiar aspects of story and gameplay, story may be too "kiddy" for some." Louis Bedigian of GameZone commends the game's graphics saying that the game "pays homage to the 3D
Final Fantasy games". Matt Paddock from Game Vortex commends the game on its faithful translation by saying, "if any of the
Harry Potter books had been translated as faithfully, the game versions of
Rowling's work would be selling gold and platinum right now". Greg Miller at
IGN criticises the game for having "a set of exactly the same events -- random battles, dungeon, random battles, boss".
GameSpy's Steve Steinberg criticises the game for its first three hours of gameplay as it shows "very slowly and methodically—the basics of a generic and less-than-compelling game". ==References==