Weird start-up

I got bored with my current game on FFVIII, so, I started again just for the hell of it.

I realised, shortly after begining the game, that I had a **** load of money and even more stuff in my ‘Item’ inventory, and I had a stupid number of certain cards. Also, I have, aparently, spent 99 hours and 59 minutes on the game.
Then in battle, I realised that I’ve got Odin with me, and this other GF that appears randomly. This other GF has four swords falling to the ground and is humanoid, dressed in red.

From this, I have two questions:

I did click on ‘REVIEW’ in the Tutorial part of the menu and clicked on Level 40, could that be what’s messed up that game?
Has this happened to anyone else?

First time I’ve heard of it. If I wanted those kinds of results, I would have to use the Debug Room to start a "New Game+" with all items and such.

The "other GF" sounds like Gilgamesh to me. Thing is, Gilgamesh is only supposed to be available on Disc 4 and never in conjunction with Odin. Of course, you shouldn’t have Odin anywhere that early in the game either, obviously.

I can honestly say I’ve never heard of this glitch. I don’t see what accessing the Tutorial would have to do with it. Oh — and are you playing the PC version or the Playstation version?

I can see a reason for this to happen if it was the PC version (you can do pretty much anything with a PC game). I highly doubt it’s the PS version though.

I’m playing the PC version, but I have to admit, at first I had Odin helping me as I got to and through the fire cavern. Then Gilgamesh was slicing, poorly I might add, at some soldiers, knocking two HP off them in two atempts, and then cutting that snake thing in half when I got close to the comunication tower.
But, either way, I have admit: it is wierd, and slighty funny.

Try uninstalling and reinstalling. That might fix it.

Unless you’d rather keep that stuff, then don’t uninstall it.

I would assume that whatever it is that’s going on is stored on the savefile, though. In which case, I would love to see it for myself. Any chance of getting a copy of that savefile?

Yeah sure, here:
You’ll have to unzip it and put it in a save slot (I had it in Save Slot 2 and it was the first one).
Try it yourself and let me know what you get. 😀

I got it and am about to try it out. This is pretty interesting.

Sweetness, I’m gonna get this downloaded and give it a shot…

Edit — That is indeed one fantastically weird savefile. I got Odin to appear twice, though not Gilgamesh. But then again, in my experience, his appearances were always rather sporadic. In any case, Odin should definitely not be showing up at that point in the game. Not to mention all of the other stuff that you described — the weird number of items, and cards etc. One thing in particular that’s really weird is having over 100 copies of certain magazines that shouldn’t even be available yet, such as the Weapons Monthly and the Pet Pals. And don’t even get me started on the Solomon Ring. Oh, I opened up the Pet Pals Vol 1. (which is only supposed to be available once you get Rinoa) and it said that it teaches you "No MEMORY CA�," which is obviously an error. As for the Test Review thing — I dunno, but I don’t think those should even be accessible until after you’ve taken each of the tests.

Strange indeed.

P.S.: Are you sure these problems only started after you went into the "Review" and clicked on Level 40? Because as far as I know, there is no Level 40 for the Test, and not only that, there shouldn’t be any review / test at all until after you’ve completed the SeeD Exam. Which makes me think that being there is just one of the symptoms of the overall problem with the file and not what originally caused it.

I can’t tell you if it was there before hand, I didn’t check until afterwards.
But, I’m not uninstalling it. It’s cool to have that much stuff at the begining, it’ll help me a lot during the game. If everything starts going drastically wrong, because of it, I’ll see if it’s a fluke and start a new game. If it’s not a fluke, then I might reinstall it.
A mate at school did say that he’d had that type of thing happen to him, but I didn’t ask him anything else.
But, to whoever downloads the file, all I can say is have fun and I hope it doesn’t do anything to your games.

That’s why I make backups of my saves just in case :).

Hmmm… Well, I’m playing the PSOne version, but I have a theory. Did the game crash to the point that you must reboot anytime in the past? The symptoms sounds like they could be caused by the savefiles going corrupted because of crashes or other things.

Nope, nothing like that. It just happened. I’ve started another game, besides that one, and I haven’t had the same luck, so obviously it was a fluke.
Also, the save file, that you can download from this thread, was actually the first time that I had saved on that particular game. Meaning I had all the items, Odin and Gilgamesh at the very begining of that game, although I guess I’ll never know why.

You sure you didn’t hatch this yourself?