Absolutely better than SA2.
Welcome to Station Square has a bright and cheery vibe, the guitar in Open Your Heart is incredible and although I'm not a huge fan of the female singing, My Sweet Passion is a fantastic song, composition-wise (lyrically it's whatever lol). Take note of the bass lines in that song, just great stuff.
I do like Knuckles’ theme more in SA1
With all of the excellent tunes from the VF2 Soundtrack, you post Shun's? It's SO underwhelming and, "bleh," compared to Akira's, Jacky's and Sarah's themes...
Not to mention the remixed/arranged version SUCKS hard; the majority of those tracks are worse than the arcade versions.
Don't get me wrong, the tune sounds great in context of the game, but as a standalone track, not the best or even close to the best.