5 out of 5

Label: Data Discs

Produced by: Shaun Crook (digital remaster)

This is still a deeply weird album. I stand by my original review of the vinyl release, but: man this remaster does quite a bit to warm me to that weirdness.

To reiterate a bit, this is a wildly inventive set of tracks, my argument is just that it doesn’t really listen well as a score. It’s very scattered, jumping between hard-hitting techno and bizarre sound experiments and then things that are somewhere in the middle of that, and even if you’re reading track names, if you have no experience with the game… good look mapping a storyline / visuals to the majority of these tunes. But on the flipside, the fact that Koshiro had scored (no pun intended) with the first two SoR soundtracks, and that the third game was gearing up to be another sales hit, surely encouraged Sega to just let him off the leash (going full dance with SoR 2 was already a risk of sorts, and hey, it went well), now with Motohiro Kawashima also more fully in tow; that result is something that sounds like no other game (then or since), and I’d only wish this could’ve been honed into something structured more for an actual music album.

But I digress.

The SoR 1 digital remaster was night and day; SoR 2’s leaning on techno made the digital remaster less directly impactful, but it was still a great listen. SoR 3 is another masterful handling by Data Disc’s Shaun Crook. While tracks that play more in the upper tonal ranges of electro fall into the SoR 2 realm of less noticeable differences, the heavy beat and experimental tracks are, again, night and day, revealing themselves to be on par with the weirdest or most aggressive stuff released 30 years later. This is, again, a “necessary” remaster in the sense that if you have any love for this score, both of DD’s versions are worth owning in their respective formats. I’m trying to remain consistent and purist with the above paragraph about my still-remaining criticisms of the score itself, but I’ll sneak in at the end to say that the accessibility of the digital and the fresh coat of aural paint – plus some distance in trying to listen to it as a game soundtrack – has put this thing in heavy listen rotatinos.