A neat little fighting game that could have been much better.
Have you played King of Fighters after 1995? Congrats, you know how this game plays, but it's not about teams this time around, it's about 1-on-1 fighting, which feels handcuffed considering the context of this game.
It came out after Capcom vs SNK 2. Now, granted, SVC Chaos had to be made for the Neo Geo arcade and home platform...for some reason, and so maybe it's a little unfair to compare this to CVS2. But more could have been done here. It feels like the same old familiar fighting that has been seen from SNK's King of Fighters series, or at least very similar to that, which is fine...but not in a great way because this is a crossover title. There are no grooves to choose from, which is disappointing. The very least that could have been done on that front is to have some kind of Capcom and SNK styles to choose, with the differences that come from each side.
The stages in this game may as well be walls with paint drying. There's no life to them. If that's what they were going for, great job, SNK Playmore, you nailed it. That's not what an epic crossover game should be going for, at least in my opinion.
Even the first Capcom vs SNK had better stages. Scratch that, even the first King of Fighters games had more colorful and lively stages. Instead of that, make way for an abandoned factory, an obsolete station, a generic forest with water on the ground, and mostly just stages that feel like they were rejected from other SNK fighting games.
The soundtrack is mostly just there, it fits the stages, but that's not high praise. These seem like minor details, but there are 10 stages, so they better be some good stages. This may be just me, but this game feels like it was thrown together as quickly as possible. Making colorful, celebratory stages for Capcom and SNK would have taken a lot of time...time which SNK Playmore perhaps didn't have.
As for the roster, it's...iffy, for me. Andy Bogard still wasn't able to get in the roster for these games, I don't think a lot of people were excited for Kasumi Todoh to be in this, and while it's cute that Mars People from Metal Slug 2 got in...really? Of all characters from Metal Slug, you go for that? Not Marco, or Fio, who was a striker in KOF 2000? Okay. The SNK side of the roster is okay, but in a negative way. There's no real twist to the majority of that side because they play so similarly to their King of Fighters versions of themselves. It was neat seeing Shiki, Earthquake and Genjuro from the Samurai Shodown series here, though.
I'll give SNK Playmore credit for putting in the work on the Capcom side, while I'm still in a positive mood. It's interesting seeing their take on those characters. Strangely, Alex didn't make it in despite being the protagonist of the Street Fighter III series. I guess Hugo beat him in a fight to get into this game? Also, M. Bison (Vega in Japan) is...lame in this game, I gotta be honest. That might be one of the worst versions of him in these crossover games. He feels small, and all the versions of the psycho crusher look watered down, even compared to Street Fighter Alpha games.
Obviously, there are limits that come from the Neo Geo system (this is what SVC Chaos was designed for, after all), but almost everything about this project leaves me scratching my head. Why didn't they try 2-on-2 fighting here? Why do players have to deal with a bad ending to winning the arcade mode by default? Really, you have to win in certain ways to get to a hidden boss at the end (Athena/Red Arremer), and beat that in order to get the good ending for your character. Making the bad ending the default one just feels like one of many questionable decisions in this game. If the stages are bland, the soundtrack is meh, and the fighting is the same thing you knew in better games...do you want to play the arcade mode again to get a proper ending?
That's the ultimate point of this review. On its own merits, it's not a bad game. In a vacuum, it's perfectly fine, but given the weight of the expectations that come with a SNK vs Capcom crossover title...this is not good enough. To go under 3 stars, this would have to actually screw up the fighting it's going for somehow, and I wouldn't go as far as saying the fighting is bad. I also wouldn't recommend spending money on this, though, unless you're a big fan of fighting games.
The console ports would have been a good chance to at least offer some 2-on-2 fighting...or even bring in the ratio system, but nope. You can unlock the hidden bosses, you have a practice mode, a survival mode to unlock art and the mentioned bosses, and you can pick some of the mid-bosses to play as them. There's also the usual versus and practice modes. That's about it, there's not much to see here.