SVC Chaos: SNK VS Capcom
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 So much potential gone to waste.
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SVC Chaos: SNK vs. Capcom is a crossover game between SNK and Capcom franchises. It was developed by SNK Playmore and released in arcades on July 24, 2003, with ports for the Neo-Geo, PlayStation 2 and Xbox soon following.
Unlike the previous games that were developed by Capcom, this game wasn't nearly as well-received.
Plot
The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where civilization is scarce and desolate. A majority of people are either missing or dead, only 36 of them survived, but now locked in a war between Chaos and Order to decice the fate of the universe, whoever wins the war will make them return back to thair peaceful century.
Bad Qualities
- While many of Capcom's characters look pretty good redesigned in the KoF style, some of them look absolutely terrible (a notable example being Sagat).
- For some reason you cannot run in this game despite being a notorious mechanic of SNK games, instead you can only dash.
- Also for some reason the dodge takes away from your meter, unlike previous games where it was completely free.
- Grabs cost meter.
- In terms of character balance, the game is an absolute mess. Many characters are extremely broken, most notably Geese Howard and Zero.
- The AI in the game is extremely cheap and will block everything, even on the easiest difficulty, making it an absolute chore to defeat them.
- One third of the characters are locked behind a cheat code!
- Having Goenitz as a mid-boss (specifically as the default mid-boss) is a terrible idea, since he is known for being an extremely cheap character with his spamming of ЁНОКАЗЭ/Yonokaze (tornado move).
- The CPU, specially the final bosses are ridiculously cheap.
- Some moves are ridiculously hard to pull off.
- Controls aren't as good as other SNK games.
- Fighting the true final bosses requires a lot of conditions, some are incredibly stupid like defeating opponents by dealing chip damage until they die. If you play the game normally like losing a round or did not finish the opponent with Super until after the final boss, no matter how good you are, you'll still get a bad ending after you defeat Serious Mr. Karate or Shin Akuma.
- The true final bosses (Athena and Firebrand, known as Red Arremer in this game) are also extremely cheap (Athena's special moves are actually Super moves that doesn't drain her Super meter and shoots out bees to stun you and Firebrand throws a barrage of projectiles and zombies), and you only have one chance to defeat them or else you'll get a bad ending after you lose the match (on the other hand, your character transforms into an animal or an evil creature upon defeat, it depends on who you fight). In addition, in order to get the endings of your characters, you must beat these two depending on the conditions throughout the game.
- The playable forms of Shin Akuma and Serious Mr. Karate were nerfed to oblivion, dealing less damage than regular Akuma and regular Mr. Karate. This resulted in them being extremely boring to play as, since you will probably resort to spamming the same moves over and over due to the low damage they deal.
- Some characters from previous games are missing, such as Morrigan Aensland from Darkstalkers, Sakura Kasugano from Street Fighter Alpha, Yuri Sakazaki from Art of Fighting, Guy from Final Fight and Joe Higashi from Fatal Fury: King of Fighters. Also, the game added Genjuro from Samurai Shodown, so why isn't his rival Haohmaru in the game as well? Hell, where's Nakoruru too?
Good Qualities
- The roster covers more franchises and more obscure characters than the Capcom games.
- While unbalanced, the game is still fun to play.
- The first video game appearance of Violent Ken, who originally appeared in Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, and would later go on to appear in Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers for Nintendo Switch.
- The idea of conversations before the match starts is pretty good. This idea carried over to The King of Fighters XIII.
- Many of the SNK characters' sprites were reused for the far better NeoGeo Battle Coliseum.
- The music is pretty good.
- It was the first fighting game appearance of Zero in any form (X or Zero incarnations), pre-dating his more well known fighting game appearances such as Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars and the more recent Marvel vs. Capcom games.
- On a related note, it was the first time that anything related with the beloved Inti Creates had a character they developed playable in a fighting game (the Zero incarnation of Zero himself), this game pre-dates Gunvolt's fighting game appearance in Blade Strangers, released 15 years later, so this game predicted the future.
Reception and Legacy
The game received mixed reception from both critics and fans of both companies for being inferior to Capcom's previous efforts, such as the downgraded gameplay, lack of fan-favorites and dull presentation, as the game was rushed to meet the deadline, since SNK has just revived themselves early this year.
This would wind up being the final game in the series where SNK and Capcom collaborated until they tried it one more time with 2006's Card Fighters DS, which was not well received by many at all for various reasons. Both parties has since moved on to make their own projects. Ever since the dissapointment of SVC: Chaos, many fans have been declaring for a brand new entry for over 2 decades, until 2021, when SNK re-released SNK vs. Capcom: The Match of the Millennium on the Nintendo Switch (and later on Steam), as well as some of the Street Fighter V cast appearin in The King of Fighters All Star, sparking a new hope for the fans. In August 2022, SNK producer Yasuyuki Oda said that both companies are interested in a potential fifth game.