Immortal Great Souls Review: The Best Progression Fantasy Series You'll Almost Quit in Book 2

The Abhorred

Immortal Great Souls opens with Bastion, and it earns points from me on page one for the protagonist's title alone: Scorio, the Abhorred. Props to Phil Tucker, because I think this is the first main character I've come across who's famous for his misdeeds, known and feared for things his past lives did that he can't even remember. That's a hook.

The setup: humanity's legendary souls went through a portal to fight the demons of the demon realm, got stranded, and now cycle through reincarnation via a pyre that nobody seems to fully control. Great Souls come back as adults, in their same bodies, powers reset to zero, memories gone; they leave journals for their future selves to rebuild from. An academy exists to train the freshly reborn back to battle strength and redeploy them to the war. Scorio wakes into this with a problem: he's been branded a Red Lister for opposing the leadership in past lives, and someone destroyed his journals. Who he was, what he actually did, and why, is the mystery engine of the series, fed to you in fragments as trials force glimpses of his past lives, and Tucker has clearly foreshadowed that the official story isn't the real one.

What Tucker does that nobody does

The reincarnation mechanic produces my favorite thing in the series, and it's something I've almost never seen an author dare: characters who come back different. Because nobody controls when a soul returns, people reincarnate into different circumstances, different mentors, different friends, and the same soul becomes a genuinely different person. Tucker commits to the nature-versus-nurture experiment even when it means effectively killing a well-liked character and handing you a stranger in their body. Most authors would never; a beloved character is an asset you don't write off. Choosing the harder path there gives this series a texture the premise deserves.

The power system sits in the Cradle and TBATE family: core-strength progression, no skill sheets, clean rank delineation where you always understand what each tier can do and how big the gaps are, and Scorio's rank-breaking abilities land harder because the ladder is so legible. Everyone's power set is distinct and interesting. The writing is polished, and I say that having tried Tucker's other work and drifted away from it; whatever he's doing differently here, editing, care, or just the right story, this is the series of his that kept me.

The fair warnings

Two, and they're both about structure, not craft.

Book one's training arc runs long. It's redeemed, mostly, by the supporting cast: the bonds, rivalries, and alliances built during it carry real weight later, so it never collapses into push-ups and technique reps. But it's longer than it needs to be, and you should know that going in.

Book two is the real test, because it commits the cardinal sin: a character regression arc. Everything Scorio built in book one, the outside-the-box training that let him overcome his class, turns out to have come at a hidden cost, and the first half of book two is him undoing his own progress and then re-training past it. Readers of this site know there's no trope I hate more, and I'll be honest: if this were an A-tier series, I'd have abandoned it right there. What saves it is the same thing that saved book one's training arc: the character writing never stops. Friendships break, rivals earn grudging respect, alliances form, promises get made, all during the slog, which means you can't even skip it without losing the relationship map for the rest of the series. My field advice: when Scorio starts breaking rocks, bump your playback to 1.25x. You keep the dialogue, you lose some of the rocks.

And then, halfway through book two, the story turns a classic trope, catastrophe converted to advantage, I won't spoil how, and from that point on it's the plot-driven series book one promised. The back half of book two is strong, and book three is excellent, no further regressions, no more training montages, Scorio finally powerful enough to matter to the people who matter.

Where it lands

S-low, with a promotion to S-mid genuinely on the table: I haven't reached the newest book yet, and the early word on it is very good. The one structural drag on the series going forward is pace of release, roughly a couple of years between books while Tucker juggles other projects, so factor the wait into your commitment. Nick Podehl narrates, and if you read his profile on this site you know I rate him; he's a big part of why the academy sections breathe.

Verdict

Worth the credit. By my assessment this is Phil Tucker's best work, and it's the bridge recommendation I give people coming off Cradle or TBATE: same core-progression clarity, more mystery in the bones, slightly more crunch without a character sheet in sight. Go in braced for the book-two regression, keep your thumb near the speed button, and the rest of the series pays you back.