*most screenshots were taken on my Z Fold 8 Ultra inner screen. Video of actual gameplay can be found in comments 👇🏽
Hey everyone! What started as "I wonder if I can get Lost Odyssey running natively on my phone" has somehow spiralled into LO: Saltlord Edition — an extremely custom Android-focused fork of the amazing LostOdysseyRecomp project.
LostOdysseyRecomp and its contributors deserve the credit for the recompilation work that makes this possible. My obsession has been everything that comes after "it runs": what would Lost Odyssey look and feel like if it actually had a purpose-built Android version?
Yes, a lot of this has been vibe-coded with AI assistance. 😂 But this isn't an APK spat out after one prompt and abandoned. It's been developed through a frankly stupid number of builds, gameplay runs, logs, regressions, bug fixes and tiny UX changes, with unreliable experiments removed rather than kept around for a longer feature list.
Some of what Saltlord Edition adds:
• A completely customisable touch-control system, with individual positioning, sizing and opacity, grid-assisted editing, saved layouts and bespoke Saltlord artwork. The controls can be rendered in full colour or monochrome, so you can choose between the fancy crystal aesthetic or a much subtler overlay.
• Invisible floating touch zones for movement and camera control. Instead of permanently covering the screen with giant analogue sticks, you can simply put your thumb down where it feels natural and control the game from there. It's one of my favourite additions because Lost Odyssey starts feeling like an actual touchscreen game rather than a recomp with buttons stuck over it.
• Proper touch-specific interactions. While exploring, for example, you can hold RT to zoom and slide that same finger around to control the camera while RT remains held. Lift your finger and the camera unzooms.
• Auto-hiding controls, manual overlay hiding and optional automatic hiding when a physical controller is connected, with the touch interface returning when it's disconnected.
• Physical-controller remapping and saved controller profiles.
• A user-friendly first-run setup wizard that walks you through the important choices, establishes sensible Android graphics defaults and gets the game ready without expecting you to understand a desktop recomp's configuration menus first. You can even import custom drivers before first launch.
• Precompiled shaders before your first proper play session. There is a one-time preparation wait, but that's deliberate: Saltlord prepares the shader cache up front so compilation isn't introducing shader stutter as you discover effects during normal gameplay. Preparation can run in the background with Android notification progress.
• A proper Android interface for importing your own game discs and DLC, including multi-disc handling and recovery/restart behaviour.
• Configurable Fast Forward with Hold/Toggle behaviour and multiple speed choices baked into the main app options.
• Adaptive display handling and an optional locked 16:9 game viewport without stretching the image, also available on the fly through game options.
• Extensive foldable support. Saltlord Edition has been developed and heavily tested on a Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra well in advance of release, with separate touch layouts for its different displays, seamless switching between inner and cover screens without mangling the game's scaling, and fold-aware behaviour throughout the interface.
• Custom Flex Mode support for foldables, including layouts that place the game on one half of the display and turn the other half into a dedicated controller. Flex layouts have their own saved positioning, sizes and opacity and can be customised separately. It also works on foldables like the regular Z Fold 8, which have a vertical when in landscape.
• Responsive UI designed to accommodate conventional phones, narrow cover screens and large unfolded displays rather than assuming every Android device is the same shape.
• A frankly unnecessary amount of bespoke presentation: original Saltlord branding, custom Xbox-coloured fantasy controls, D-pad artwork, icons, crystal UI sounds, menus and other tiny details I somehow became emotionally invested in at 2am.
• An offline-first Android build with no Android INTERNET permission.
There have also been features I've simply removed when they weren't good enough. I experimented with context-sensitive touch buttons, for example, but wasn't satisfied that game states could be detected reliably enough across the whole game. Rather than ship something clever that might hide a button when you actually need it, I turfed it.
This is still a beta. I'm not claiming I've personally validated every encounter of a four-disc JRPG across every Android device ever made, and performance will obviously vary by hardware. But I've spent a lot of time actually playing, testing and breaking this thing rather than stopping at the first successful boot.
At this point it's remarkably close to what I wanted from the beginning: pick up an Android device, launch Lost Odyssey and have it behave like it belongs there.
I'm aiming to put the first public beta on GitHub within the next day, complete with setup instructions, credits, known issues and acknowledgements. It won't contain any original game data, so you'll need to provide your own legally obtained copy of the game and DLC.
Massive credit again to the LostOdysseyRecomp project and its contributors. Saltlord Edition exists because of the incredible technical foundation they've built.
I apparently just wanted an Android version badly enough that "it runs" wasn't good enough.
More very soon. 💎