Phone has 'amnesia' and other weird symptoms, is it basically permanently bricked?

[Android Central Question]

So I have an old Xperia I'm trying to revive and it has some symptoms I have never seen in a phone. Basically anything I do, the phone does not remember, like it has some form of amnesia. Changing any settings like language, taking a picture, changing lockscreen pattern it all resets after I restart the phone. What's the best part- it won't let me get to recovery either. Factory reset from settings just restarts the device. adb reboot recovery and adb reboot bootloader also just restart the phone. I also couldn't get flashtool to work, got the stupid not a sin file error for which I have neither the time nor tech savvy to deal with. Basically I'm ready to write this off as some weird hardware issue unless anybody has ideas?