Zachski: I'm guessing you don't have any saves from before that, so...
you'll have to restart from the beginning again.
Some future tips:
Keep multiple saves. Ideally, you want to make a new save each time you save, but I hate that, so generally keep like... 5 or more different save slots that serve different purpose - one for before/after battles, three that you cycle through, and one for when you're at low health and are in danger of dying. Doubling these saves will be useful.
Never save during a "cutscene". Only save if you can move your character around.
Be diligent about saving! Always save frequently! You never know when you go through 5 different battles earning lots and lots of money, only to encounter a crash three steps outside of Erana's Peace where you had planned to save... and you haven't saved since before you trained your stats up to where monsters were trivial.
You're absolutely right; in fact I keep more than one save state to avoid this problem but it happened that I saved my game too quickly without noticing what had happened (and I was in the middle of the game). I never played all five games and I wanted to create a character from scratch - and thus I will have to begin (oh well...). "Save early, save often" and KNOW when to save I'd say!
