Just to preface this, I think the game is great and don't have any major issues with it as a whole, and very recently started to play it again after a long hiatus of mine.
Long story short, I made quite a decent chunk of progress after returning to the game (like around 7-8 hours of gameplay) and found the Gardevoir interaction in the house where the trainer gets kidnapped. I saved before the mission on a new save file separate from my main one because I am overly paranoid that I'd get stuck in a difficult area, and went through the quest(?) up until the Drifblim battle. I lost the fight because I had no moves that could hit it and so respawned at the previous autosave that the game made. And then when I respawned here, I saved the game in yet another different slot and closed the game for 5-10 mins because I had irl things to handle. However, when I opened the game again and loaded into that save it would immediately give me a black screen and subsequently booted me to the main menu I then saw that you could load previous saves when you load a file, so I tried all of the previous autosaves on that file which I could, which only gave me the same result. I then tried to load up my other save slots, which to my horror produced the same results. Therefore, I closed the game and hoped that it may fix itself. Flash forward to today and all of my saves have either been deleted or have become inaccessible, including the ones that I didn't try to open when I was having these issues, so I can no longer load them up and the doesn't give me an option to load previous saves on the main menu anymore, only to create a new game.
So, my question is this: can I fix this or am I just fucked and have to start from the beginning again?
(Just to be clear, I wouldn't be that mad about restarting, just peeved that all of that effort was for nothing)