This reminds me of why I never beat ff8 and why I now cycle saves in all my games.
FF8 has a part at the end that you can permanently softlock if you meet a complicated set of criteria. All of your abilities are stripped away and you have to beat a number of bosses to retrieve them. If you are at a certain level, which scales the bosses to their hardest tier but leaves you at the lowest point of the tier side of the bosses will one shot you.
When that happened and I realized I only had the one save file I just about lost it. No way to go back and level more or otherwise prepare beforehand. Only option would be to start over from the beginning.