What is Brave Wave’s Street Fighter II The Definitive Soundtrack? It isn’t a remix album and it isn’t necessarily a new arrangement of the music, although you could easily be convinced otherwise. It’s the first in the label’s Generation Series that aims to painstakingly revitalize some of gaming’s unreleased, incomplete, or poorly preserved soundtracks. For Street Fighter II that meant making new source recordings directly from Capcom’s CPS-1 (Street Fighter II) and CPS-2 (Super Street Fighter II Turbo) arcade hardware.
A lot of work went into cleaning up the recording before it was finally mixed and mastered and ultimately signed off on by original composer, Yoko Shimomura. Did the months of delicate, elaborate work pay off? Play the side-by-side comparison within and know that you’ve never heard Street Fighter II’s music so clearly before, and not just because you aren’t in a raucous arcade.
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