Severed Chains Android

Warning

This is an unofficial fork. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by the Legend of Dragoon Modding community or the official Severed Chains project. Please report Android-specific issues on this repository — not upstream.

About Severed Chains

An Android port of Severed Chains — the fan-made project that rebuilt The Legend of Dragoon from scratch in Java (not an emulator), with a full modding API.

All credit for the engine goes to the Legend of Dragoon Modding community. Visit their player guide and Discord for more about the original project. This fork keeps the game complete and faithful on Android while making it comfortable to play on a touchscreen.

Copyright Information

Even though it is not an emulator, Severed Chains cannot be played without the user providing the LoD disk images. Assets are extracted from the ROMs at runtime. This codebase does not include any official Legend of Dragoon code or assets.

Getting the game

Requires Android 8.0+ on arm64 or x86_64 (no 32-bit support) and enough free storage for your disc images.

1. Download the latest android-release.apk from the Releases page and install it.
2. On first launch, the app walks you through adding your Legend of Dragoon disc images (ISOs/BINs).
3. Pick a campaign and play — saves, mods, and settings carry between runs.

Note

Upgrading from v0.1.34 or older: the signing key was rotated in v0.1.35, so Android won't update in place — uninstall the old build first. Everything under Documents/Severed Chains/ (saves, ISOs, logs) survives the uninstall.

What's different in this port

Touch controls built for mobile

• On-screen controls styled after a modern glass-and-gold controller: shoulder buttons along the top, a face-button diamond, and Select/Start centered at the bottom.
• Pick your movement control in the in-game Controls menu: a floating analog stick, a classic d-pad, or both side by side. The stick anchors wherever your thumb lands; the d-pad supports sliding and diagonals.
• Face buttons can show PlayStation, Xbox, or Switch-style labels — your choice in the in-game Controls menu.
• An opacity slider lets you see through the controls when they'd cover text.
• Rearrange the controls to fit your hands: drag the centre of the face-button diamond to move it and pinch to resize. A solo d-pad moves and resizes the same way — hold any direction and add a second finger to resize.

Physical controllers are still fully supported, just like upstream.

Mods baked in

• Dragoon Modifier — the official difficulty and customization mod. Pick from several difficulty modes (including Hard and Hell), show monster HP bars, enable enrage bonuses, and more.
• Dragoon XP Share — party members on the bench who have a dragoon spirit gain a share of dragoon XP too, adjustable in the config.
• Additional Additions — registers custom additions made with the Additional Additions Editor; drop the exported .json files in mods/additional_additions under the app folder.
• Icon Turn Order — the turn-order display from Dragoon Modifier as a standalone mod, with player and monster portrait icons in battle.
• Lloyd Mod — adds Lloyd as a playable character, with his own spells, menus and battle scripts. Can't wait for him to join? Enter the Konami Code on the submap — up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A — to add him to the party early.
• Stardust Indicator — this fork's own mod: a pulsing gold sparkle marks every uncollected stardust on the submap, and a Stardust Tracker entry in the Goods menu shows which ones you've found and which are still out there, so you never miss one.
• Save Point Heal — this fork's own mod: opening the save menu at a save point restores your active party's HP and MP — Lloyd included when the Lloyd Mod is enabled.

Dragoon Modifier and Additional Additions are the LoD Modding community's own mods; Icon Turn Order and Lloyd Mod are by Zychronix. All are vendored and kept up to date with their upstream sources. Stardust Indicator is maintained in this repo under own_mods/.

Shared folders — saves and ISOs

Game data normally lives in the app's private storage, which isn't reachable without root — so once you grant storage access, Documents/Severed Chains/ gets two public folders:

• Saves — your campaign saves live here once access is granted, so you can back them up, restore them, and keep them even if the app is uninstalled. Saves made before granting access are moved across automatically on next launch.
• ISOs — disc images are detected here automatically: the setup screen and the unpacker scan it alongside the internal folder. Discs picked through the file picker are copied into ISOs when access is granted (and ones already inside the app move across on next launch), so you can add, remove, or replace them from a file manager or PC.

To grant access: the setup screen asks once on first run, and its Enable access button is always there as a fallback (or grant All files access for Severed Chains in system Settings → Apps → Special app access). Uses All files access on Android 11+ and the legacy storage permission on Android 9 and below (Android 10 sits in the scoped-storage gap — its file-manager route doesn't apply). If access is revoked while saves live in Saves, the game falls back to its internal folder — re-grant to see them again.

Versioning and updates

• Each release reports its real version number, so installs upgrade cleanly.
• Launcher icon featuring Dart, because it's LoD after all.

For the full list of everything this fork changes relative to upstream — rendering, storage, compatibility work, built-in mods and more — see CHANGES_FROM_UPSTREAM.md.

If the game won't start

Severed Chains renders with OpenGL ES 3.2, with an automatic fallback to a compatibility mode on GPUs that don't fully support it (e.g. older Mali). If the app closes itself while starting up, just open it again — a launch that dies mid-initialization is remembered, and the next one automatically retries in the safer mode.

If it still won't start:

• Try the Compatibility renderer toggle on the setup screen — it switches to the GLES 3.1 path (no geometry shader) on next launch, which works around GPU drivers that mishandle them. Already past setup? Re-open it with adb shell am start -n com.legendofdragoon.severedchains/legend.game.android.MainActivity --ez force_setup true, or test the mode directly with --ez force_es31 true.
• Try the ANGLE graphics driver: enable Developer Options, then Developer options → Preferred graphics driver → select Severed Chains → ANGLE. This runs OpenGL on top of Vulkan and often works around broken vendor drivers.
• Report the problem with the logs in Documents/Severed Chains/logs/ — crash and debug logs there include your device model, GPU, and driver versions, which is what's needed to support new hardware. Debug APKs on the Releases page record the full engine log.

Crash reports

If the game crashes, the next launch offers to send the crash log as a GitHub issue — Always send to do it automatically from then on, Send once, or Never send. Reports go through a small relay that deduplicates by crash signature, so repeats become comments on the existing issue instead of new ones. They include your device model, Android version, and the crash log — never saves or personal files.

Logs stay on your device under Documents/Severed Chains/logs/ either way and can always be shared manually (e.g. on Discord) if the upload fails or you'd rather not send. No Google Play Services required, so it works on handhelds like Retroid and Odin too.

Controls

Gamepads are supported out of the box — connect one and pick it in the in-game options. Onscreen controls are the default for touch play and can be styled and arranged as described above.