Yuzo Koshiro / Motohiro Kawashima – Bare Knuckle III

Best game in the series (as long as you're playing the original japanese version not the awful butchered western release) and best music in the series hands down.
After Koshiro's blatant, note for note and beat for beat plagiarism of house music classics by artists such as soul 2 soul, black box, bomb the bass, enya etc in the original streets of rage (how he got away with that legally while plastering his name proudly all over the packaging and even on the title screen of the game itself is baffling)... Motohiro Kawashima came to score the third game and brought with him a modern technopunk mindset and custom built software, resulting in a sound that was brand new.
This soundtrack went on to influence electronic music in the UK about 15 years later with the "post dubstep" and "uk bass music" movements. Cacophonous, noiserock-tier techno nonsense, absolutely batshit wonderful stuff that matches the frenetic and frictive gameplay that Bare Knuckle 3 exhibits over its predecessors and its extremely weak fan-made sequel that came out in 2020.
This one really filters out the casuals.

The sound quality here on this release is probably the worst out of the original releases of the SoR soundtracks. The sound is muffled and sounds very muddy, like it was taken from a worn down cassette tape.

Whoa! What happened?

This was my first though upon playing five seconds of Streets of Rage 3 eleven years after its summer 1994 release. The gameplay was lacking, the "story" was a mess, the character pallets had been messed with, and the "music" was an absolute, utter abomination. This was a series that redefined video game music and continues to be highly regarded to this day. So what went wrong with Streets of Rage 3? Why does the music sound so...broken?

My guess is that Yuzo Koshiro just tried to be too experimental and instead of approaching this entry with a techno/funk sound and a splash of calypso he went full on industrial/jungle/abstract. It just doesn't work. It's an unlistenable MESS of a soundtrack and a miserable, pitiful end for a series that was born into sonic nobility.

Don't go into this thinking that the infectious funk and familiar melodies of Streets of Rage and Streets of Rage 2 are going to delight your eardrums. This is a soundtrack that will make them bleed. This is noise that will make you wish you were deaf.