A PS3 repair for a special PS2 game (Pt. 1)
Back in the time of the fat PlayStation 3 and roughly at the end-of-life of PlayStation 2s, there appeared a PS2 game called Eternal Poison (Poison Pink in Japan). This was a darkly gothic, richly designed and intricately-plotted tactical RPG-by then itself a dying genre-that had enough serious flaws it almost immediately fizzled. The company that made it, Flight-Plan, quietly folded three years later. The artist responsible for the truly beautiful character designs, tomatika, is someone I still hope gains more work elsewhere, and especially for games released in the West, but also seems to have also gone quiet. To put it mildly, Eternal Poison is not a game that will likely see a PS4 remaster. I doubt it would see even a PS Vita port and it's not on PS Now. But the magic of this game is such I am hellbent on finding some way of completing it eleven years later on our dead fat PS3 because I never got to see most of its story. Our original PS3 died after we completed our first campaign, then again after a restart. We tried 3rd party repair and Sony repairs. The latter wiped our save files, bringing us back to square one. Each time, we tried and tried, but our PS3 would fail us. The first-gen PS3 is essential because it had PS2 backwards compatibility and more importantly, unlike the PS2/PS3 slims, actually had scaling for modern TV screens. So began my extremely long-term project to fix our final fat PS3 retry, the saga of which appears here today.
But first, the game itself
What sort of game has me trying to fix a notoriously fickle console in the hopes it stays alive long enough for me to play it? I think I should start with the flaws, so we don't go into this with false hopes. Eternal Poison's biggest one is the 3D animations it uses for its attack cut scenes. The 3D models in these were primitive-looking even in its day. Any reasonable person wanting to get into this title is advised to turn off 3D animations at the earliest opportunity. Trust me, you won't be missing anything. The second is that Eternal Poison runs off a complex, some might say even convoluted, tactical system that is not intuitive. Every unit has Persona 2-era amounts of weaknesses/strengths including the monsters. The average character sheet probably has as many stats and percentiles on it as a tabletop RPG, all of which you must balance if you want to win. Every action requires navigating several menus. It's old school for the people who remember old-school. Finally, every move you take on the field is designed to squeeze XP from stones. Fire Emblem-types will go, "Oh, that." Yes, that. Just like beloved titles of old, healers take years to level because killing blows give the most XP. Meanwhile, you're buffing units very slowly on the way to the exit because every experience point is precious, while your turn counter grows perilously close to losing.
Now the good part. Eternal Poison's greatest asset is its atmospheric game lore and intricate storyline. Each branch of the story is told through the perspective of one of three starting parties. You can choose which party to play in what order, but you're locked on that party's arc once you begin the campaign. Completing their good endings unlocks a further two playable parties, and completing their good endings in turn unlocks the final path. Many of the early reviews of Eternal Poison panned it because although the game gives vague ideas on how to proceed in each arc, it's very easy to get the normal endings playing blind-never seeing the hidden subtleties of its plot.
The basic gist is: a dungeon leading into the world of demons, Besek, appears in the Kingdom of Valdia. Valdia's eldest princess is kidnapped by the demons and you are on one of the missions to save her or explore Besek independently. Each party also has a side quest to collect the demons they encounter in a Librum (a sort of Pokedex of the Damned), each for reasons individual to their storyline. Once inside Besek, it soon becomes clear that this realm twists perspectives of time and reality. People meet dead acquaintances who act perfectly normal, sometimes younger or older than they remembered them. Others meet alternative versions of themselves. There's an adventurers' hub (your base) where you can hire additional party members (the characters are randomly generated each time you start a campaign). However, talking to your party mates in town hints broadly that these adventurers are ghosts themselves, having previously died while exploring Besek but forgetting who they are. It's also clear that people you "find" and "save" along the way might not be human. It can't be human to capture demons in order that you might grind them into paste (with animation!) and gain their powers-a service offered by a suspiciously vampiric woman in a corset by the way. This last service, by the way, is actually useful.
Your three starting parties have main characters that were carefully thought out, both in terms of personality and how their stories tie together. The "starring" party leader is Thage, a gothic lolita sorceress who travels with a horned albino wolf and a child she enslaved. She's there to collect demons, some of whom seem to have met her before and actually greet her in combat. By turns cold and perceptive, her tale is the lynch pin for every other arc. Olifen is the straight up knight rescuing a princess. He doesn't seem interesting at first, but you get the idea he's more aware of the Valdian political intrigue behind his clearly suicidal mission than he lets on. His story sets up the background of the 'outside' world you see inside Besek. Ashley is the younger princess of Valdia, who is there to rescue her sister. She's a lawful good cleric-again, you start off thinking, "Why would I even want to play her story?"-but hers is the story that really ramps up and connects what's going on behind the Valdian throne and why Besek has appeared. It's not just the party leaders with great characterisation; their fellow main party members also grow and change, some revealing dark secrets, throughout each campaign. Absolutely no one should be taken at face value.
Stylistically, I love the mix of gothic lolita lace and dark fantasy tropes. The character portraits alone are worth the purchase to me-we're still kicking ourselves for not buying the deluxe version with an art book-as it pairs pale, wispy fantasy Europeans (think Castlevania) with alien, creepy monstrosities you encounter. Voice acting in English veers between excellent, like Thage's "too tired to care" aloofness, to aggravating over time, like the shopkeeper in town who greets you with "Ho, ho, ho!" every time you need to get a potion. On the whole though, the main characters are voiced well. It wouldn't and shouldn't stop you from wanting to pursue the stories to the end. I'm saying this as someone who usually throws up my hands in despair at English localisations (especially from the early days of Japanese imports-quality these days is very much on a par with the original Japanese voicing or can be).
Fond memories aside, the repair
It's not that it took me eleven years to try and repair our PS3. Inertia and ending the work day feeling boneless took up large chunks of time in between. As I understand it, fat PS3s at release, like ours, were incredibly prone to overheating and living shorter, tragic lives than their later slim counterparts. The main issue was that the solder used for the CPU and GPU could grow brittle with use, and the thermal paste that came with was cheap, reducing its effectiveness quicker than it should. Repairs I looked up online are actually stop gaps. You're hoping to bring your console back to life because it's dead and out of warranty anyway, with the expectation its life span was only extendable so far. They involved two parts: 1) reflowing the solder under the chips with heat and 2) replacing the thermal paste on the chips.
Thankfully, this didn't require me to remove the chip and resolder it manually. I was expecting that, but most places simply suggest using a heat gun or heat source (some folks put their motherboards in ovens). Changing thermal paste is one of the things I used to ask the store to do if I was building a box from scratch because I was always terrified I'd do it wrong. This PS3 was already dead, and technically applying thermal paste isn't hard. It's more or less like spreading butter on toast, if your toast could fry when connected to a power source or kill your setup from overheating...as happened here. Of the two, it was the heat gun that scared me more because thermal paste wear is over time. Accidentally burning circuits is an immediate fail. I haven't held a soldering gun in nearly three decades (they're fun, deadly points of heat).
Online places still sell fat PS3 repair kits, which came with pre-cut sticky padding, the right-size bits and in the case of the one I got, a heat gun. Personally, I should have gotten a voltage tester pen before starting on this project-it's one of those things I keep thinking would be nice every time I start on an electricity-pertinent project and forget. The biggest and most fascinating bugbear for PS3 repair is actually taking the darn thing apart and putting it back together again. This is because the motherboard is sandwiched between two metal plates screwed under a plastic chassis and top cover. What wasn't clear from any of the guides I read was that the plastic chassis actually requires more elbow grease than you think to pry apart. I was honestly afraid I would break the top cover the first few times I handled it.
Because PS3s were meant to be assembled by people in factories, each large body piece had signage to help tell people where each screw went. The only thing that was a pain in the nuts to unscrew was the security torx screw. I have a torx screw set which claimed to have the right size (I used it to open and clean our release-version PS4), but it wasn't a good fit. I wound up struggling for about an hour using various things and just managing with a flat head screwdriver. For reference, I bought the repair kit after I had opened up the shell, just to make sure stuff in there was still workable, i.e. not charred, fan not dead, no inexplicable insects. Revealing each layer was fun, I admit, just learning how this worked together. I carefully followed directions on what needed heating and changing. It took me about 5 hours because I was being careful and learning on the fly.
Then came the "Will it turn on?" test. My first try got the red standby light on but although the eject button worked, I couldn't start the PS3 with the front power button. This told me maybe the button wasn't aligned right when I reassembled it. I actually had some trouble when I was putting that back in as I thought I was missing a couple of screws, so I probably moved stuff around too much. Taking off the the top plastic case was tedious, but I made sure stuff was screwed in right (the power button side was in fact loose) and just in case took out and returned the tiny ribbon attaching the controller for the eject/power button to the motherboard. Plugged it in and nothing happened. Nothing. No light at all. (This is the part I cursed not having a tester pen.) After accounting for different power outlets in my house randomly not working (it's an old Victorian and it's not unheard of), I figured, well, it had to be the controller board again. After double-checking some places online, I figured what happened was in the midst of all my fumbling, I accidentally broke that tiny ribbon connecting the motherboard to the controller. Which made me feel pretty dumb. To be fair though, it's a finger-length board connected to the MB by a fragile, shoelace-thick ribbon.
Our friend Erin also owned a fat PS3 that died and graciously gave it to us at one point, so my first idea was to open that, steal its ribbon and try it on ours. Note: Before opening PS3s, remember to compare the model numbers between them to make sure they're actually the same machine. I discovered that her old PS3 both did not have the controller board/fragile ribbon setup at all and that later iterations of fat PS3s just had more resilience built into them. I tested powering up her PS3 before I opened it. It looks like the controller for the eject/power buttons was built into the top cover in this iteration, removing the need for accidentally breakable ribbons between it and the bottom half of the PS3. It also lacked the four USB ports on the side (the sign that it wasn't backwards compatible with PS2 games), which in our version was really a little box on the inside attached to the top cover with yet another thin ribbon plugged into the MB. The USB ribbon is about as bad as the one on the controller. I couldn't lock in our USB port ribbon on the board because the clip for it was either broken or slightly too big. Previous techs at Sony who repaired our machine clearly knew this was a problem because that ribbon was taped to the bottom case when I opened up the lid.
Mind you, it was late. I didn't stare too long at the inside of the spare PS3's upper case to see if the controller wasn't behind a panel I could just take apart. That's coming today, when I have fresh eyes. In the meantime, I ordered a replacement ribbon online which I hope actually ships. It's a store I have never come across before that apparently specialises in game machine parts, and ships from the US, or so it claims. But yes, this is fun...maybe eventually slightly expensive fun. We'll see though. Hopefully, the ribbon was all it was. If I fried the chipboard, I might have to see just how bad our PS2 slim handles our 4K television...a process I suspect will be grisly. We gave up trying to tag team Persona 2: Eternal Punishment on the PS3 because oh, lort was it pixelated. It won't be world-ending if I wind up with a screen that was just the resolution of 1998, but it will be annoying to tag-team. That, by the way, is the other huge reason I am trying to fix a console that's been dead maybe a decade. Outside of the amazing story in Eternal Poison, its punishingly hard tactical element and gothic art, tactical RPGs for TV consoles is one of my top favourite shared activities with the spouse. We have a joke, we only are able to finish games we tag team, because both of us grind to a halt for different reasons in long campaigns. (He hits a "sudden difficulty curve" wall or dungeon with all the annoying teleportation puzzles; I skipped the sudden difficulty curve because I ran around the parking lot fifty times and my party is ten levels too much against the current boss....but I was sick of actually playing the game because I ran around the parking lot fifty times.) Updates pending while I wait for the US Post.
But first, the game itself
What sort of game has me trying to fix a notoriously fickle console in the hopes it stays alive long enough for me to play it? I think I should start with the flaws, so we don't go into this with false hopes. Eternal Poison's biggest one is the 3D animations it uses for its attack cut scenes. The 3D models in these were primitive-looking even in its day. Any reasonable person wanting to get into this title is advised to turn off 3D animations at the earliest opportunity. Trust me, you won't be missing anything. The second is that Eternal Poison runs off a complex, some might say even convoluted, tactical system that is not intuitive. Every unit has Persona 2-era amounts of weaknesses/strengths including the monsters. The average character sheet probably has as many stats and percentiles on it as a tabletop RPG, all of which you must balance if you want to win. Every action requires navigating several menus. It's old school for the people who remember old-school. Finally, every move you take on the field is designed to squeeze XP from stones. Fire Emblem-types will go, "Oh, that." Yes, that. Just like beloved titles of old, healers take years to level because killing blows give the most XP. Meanwhile, you're buffing units very slowly on the way to the exit because every experience point is precious, while your turn counter grows perilously close to losing.
Now the good part. Eternal Poison's greatest asset is its atmospheric game lore and intricate storyline. Each branch of the story is told through the perspective of one of three starting parties. You can choose which party to play in what order, but you're locked on that party's arc once you begin the campaign. Completing their good endings unlocks a further two playable parties, and completing their good endings in turn unlocks the final path. Many of the early reviews of Eternal Poison panned it because although the game gives vague ideas on how to proceed in each arc, it's very easy to get the normal endings playing blind-never seeing the hidden subtleties of its plot.
The basic gist is: a dungeon leading into the world of demons, Besek, appears in the Kingdom of Valdia. Valdia's eldest princess is kidnapped by the demons and you are on one of the missions to save her or explore Besek independently. Each party also has a side quest to collect the demons they encounter in a Librum (a sort of Pokedex of the Damned), each for reasons individual to their storyline. Once inside Besek, it soon becomes clear that this realm twists perspectives of time and reality. People meet dead acquaintances who act perfectly normal, sometimes younger or older than they remembered them. Others meet alternative versions of themselves. There's an adventurers' hub (your base) where you can hire additional party members (the characters are randomly generated each time you start a campaign). However, talking to your party mates in town hints broadly that these adventurers are ghosts themselves, having previously died while exploring Besek but forgetting who they are. It's also clear that people you "find" and "save" along the way might not be human. It can't be human to capture demons in order that you might grind them into paste (with animation!) and gain their powers-a service offered by a suspiciously vampiric woman in a corset by the way. This last service, by the way, is actually useful.
Your three starting parties have main characters that were carefully thought out, both in terms of personality and how their stories tie together. The "starring" party leader is Thage, a gothic lolita sorceress who travels with a horned albino wolf and a child she enslaved. She's there to collect demons, some of whom seem to have met her before and actually greet her in combat. By turns cold and perceptive, her tale is the lynch pin for every other arc. Olifen is the straight up knight rescuing a princess. He doesn't seem interesting at first, but you get the idea he's more aware of the Valdian political intrigue behind his clearly suicidal mission than he lets on. His story sets up the background of the 'outside' world you see inside Besek. Ashley is the younger princess of Valdia, who is there to rescue her sister. She's a lawful good cleric-again, you start off thinking, "Why would I even want to play her story?"-but hers is the story that really ramps up and connects what's going on behind the Valdian throne and why Besek has appeared. It's not just the party leaders with great characterisation; their fellow main party members also grow and change, some revealing dark secrets, throughout each campaign. Absolutely no one should be taken at face value.
Stylistically, I love the mix of gothic lolita lace and dark fantasy tropes. The character portraits alone are worth the purchase to me-we're still kicking ourselves for not buying the deluxe version with an art book-as it pairs pale, wispy fantasy Europeans (think Castlevania) with alien, creepy monstrosities you encounter. Voice acting in English veers between excellent, like Thage's "too tired to care" aloofness, to aggravating over time, like the shopkeeper in town who greets you with "Ho, ho, ho!" every time you need to get a potion. On the whole though, the main characters are voiced well. It wouldn't and shouldn't stop you from wanting to pursue the stories to the end. I'm saying this as someone who usually throws up my hands in despair at English localisations (especially from the early days of Japanese imports-quality these days is very much on a par with the original Japanese voicing or can be).
Fond memories aside, the repair
It's not that it took me eleven years to try and repair our PS3. Inertia and ending the work day feeling boneless took up large chunks of time in between. As I understand it, fat PS3s at release, like ours, were incredibly prone to overheating and living shorter, tragic lives than their later slim counterparts. The main issue was that the solder used for the CPU and GPU could grow brittle with use, and the thermal paste that came with was cheap, reducing its effectiveness quicker than it should. Repairs I looked up online are actually stop gaps. You're hoping to bring your console back to life because it's dead and out of warranty anyway, with the expectation its life span was only extendable so far. They involved two parts: 1) reflowing the solder under the chips with heat and 2) replacing the thermal paste on the chips.
Thankfully, this didn't require me to remove the chip and resolder it manually. I was expecting that, but most places simply suggest using a heat gun or heat source (some folks put their motherboards in ovens). Changing thermal paste is one of the things I used to ask the store to do if I was building a box from scratch because I was always terrified I'd do it wrong. This PS3 was already dead, and technically applying thermal paste isn't hard. It's more or less like spreading butter on toast, if your toast could fry when connected to a power source or kill your setup from overheating...as happened here. Of the two, it was the heat gun that scared me more because thermal paste wear is over time. Accidentally burning circuits is an immediate fail. I haven't held a soldering gun in nearly three decades (they're fun, deadly points of heat).
Online places still sell fat PS3 repair kits, which came with pre-cut sticky padding, the right-size bits and in the case of the one I got, a heat gun. Personally, I should have gotten a voltage tester pen before starting on this project-it's one of those things I keep thinking would be nice every time I start on an electricity-pertinent project and forget. The biggest and most fascinating bugbear for PS3 repair is actually taking the darn thing apart and putting it back together again. This is because the motherboard is sandwiched between two metal plates screwed under a plastic chassis and top cover. What wasn't clear from any of the guides I read was that the plastic chassis actually requires more elbow grease than you think to pry apart. I was honestly afraid I would break the top cover the first few times I handled it.
Because PS3s were meant to be assembled by people in factories, each large body piece had signage to help tell people where each screw went. The only thing that was a pain in the nuts to unscrew was the security torx screw. I have a torx screw set which claimed to have the right size (I used it to open and clean our release-version PS4), but it wasn't a good fit. I wound up struggling for about an hour using various things and just managing with a flat head screwdriver. For reference, I bought the repair kit after I had opened up the shell, just to make sure stuff in there was still workable, i.e. not charred, fan not dead, no inexplicable insects. Revealing each layer was fun, I admit, just learning how this worked together. I carefully followed directions on what needed heating and changing. It took me about 5 hours because I was being careful and learning on the fly.
Then came the "Will it turn on?" test. My first try got the red standby light on but although the eject button worked, I couldn't start the PS3 with the front power button. This told me maybe the button wasn't aligned right when I reassembled it. I actually had some trouble when I was putting that back in as I thought I was missing a couple of screws, so I probably moved stuff around too much. Taking off the the top plastic case was tedious, but I made sure stuff was screwed in right (the power button side was in fact loose) and just in case took out and returned the tiny ribbon attaching the controller for the eject/power button to the motherboard. Plugged it in and nothing happened. Nothing. No light at all. (This is the part I cursed not having a tester pen.) After accounting for different power outlets in my house randomly not working (it's an old Victorian and it's not unheard of), I figured, well, it had to be the controller board again. After double-checking some places online, I figured what happened was in the midst of all my fumbling, I accidentally broke that tiny ribbon connecting the motherboard to the controller. Which made me feel pretty dumb. To be fair though, it's a finger-length board connected to the MB by a fragile, shoelace-thick ribbon.
Our friend Erin also owned a fat PS3 that died and graciously gave it to us at one point, so my first idea was to open that, steal its ribbon and try it on ours. Note: Before opening PS3s, remember to compare the model numbers between them to make sure they're actually the same machine. I discovered that her old PS3 both did not have the controller board/fragile ribbon setup at all and that later iterations of fat PS3s just had more resilience built into them. I tested powering up her PS3 before I opened it. It looks like the controller for the eject/power buttons was built into the top cover in this iteration, removing the need for accidentally breakable ribbons between it and the bottom half of the PS3. It also lacked the four USB ports on the side (the sign that it wasn't backwards compatible with PS2 games), which in our version was really a little box on the inside attached to the top cover with yet another thin ribbon plugged into the MB. The USB ribbon is about as bad as the one on the controller. I couldn't lock in our USB port ribbon on the board because the clip for it was either broken or slightly too big. Previous techs at Sony who repaired our machine clearly knew this was a problem because that ribbon was taped to the bottom case when I opened up the lid.
Mind you, it was late. I didn't stare too long at the inside of the spare PS3's upper case to see if the controller wasn't behind a panel I could just take apart. That's coming today, when I have fresh eyes. In the meantime, I ordered a replacement ribbon online which I hope actually ships. It's a store I have never come across before that apparently specialises in game machine parts, and ships from the US, or so it claims. But yes, this is fun...maybe eventually slightly expensive fun. We'll see though. Hopefully, the ribbon was all it was. If I fried the chipboard, I might have to see just how bad our PS2 slim handles our 4K television...a process I suspect will be grisly. We gave up trying to tag team Persona 2: Eternal Punishment on the PS3 because oh, lort was it pixelated. It won't be world-ending if I wind up with a screen that was just the resolution of 1998, but it will be annoying to tag-team. That, by the way, is the other huge reason I am trying to fix a console that's been dead maybe a decade. Outside of the amazing story in Eternal Poison, its punishingly hard tactical element and gothic art, tactical RPGs for TV consoles is one of my top favourite shared activities with the spouse. We have a joke, we only are able to finish games we tag team, because both of us grind to a halt for different reasons in long campaigns. (He hits a "sudden difficulty curve" wall or dungeon with all the annoying teleportation puzzles; I skipped the sudden difficulty curve because I ran around the parking lot fifty times and my party is ten levels too much against the current boss....but I was sick of actually playing the game because I ran around the parking lot fifty times.) Updates pending while I wait for the US Post.