Trainer or cheat engine to change party members

[ザマスまんぞん]

Is there any of the above available?
Would like to play this with a party composed of Squall, Laguna and Edea.

[Vagrant]

Most likely possible but it's going to take a good code hacker to find the specific values to swap characters or make them available as regulars. And also not to softlock the game in certain situations.

Take a look at this old GameFAQ gameshark code list. You can see it's possible to enable Seifer or Edea.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/197343-final-fantasy-viii/faqs/42007

[Xengre]

Available? I don't know. If you mess with cheat engine and stuff, yourself, it should definitely be possible though. In the original PSX version you could do this with Gameshark/Codebreaker/etc. Just keep in mind to save frequently if you figure it out because such character swapping is known to freeze the game at certain points with certain party members in the FF series (in FFVIII, iirc Edea was particularly notorious for this at spots).

A quick Google immediately suggests this for example on the FFVIII Steam version https://steamcommunity.com/app/39150/discussions/0/618459405719011168/ So you can either tinker, yourself, or wait but it will probably happen eventually.

[Arkhne]

Hyne save editor worked for both PS1 and first PC port, and had this feature (and a very easy to use GUI). I've also read that the new version uses the same save structure as the old PC version, so if you're lucky, the old save editors should still work, otherwise, it's just a waiting game until they are updated.

[ザマスまんぞん]

And it works for the Remaster too! =D
Thanks.