Reverse Aerial Rushes (RAR) are a technique vital to understand for players wanting to take Ultimate seriously, allowing players to back air instantly, keeping their forward momentum and opening up combo potential by potentially chaining back airs or finishing off opponents with a powerful back air. In this article, we’ll be going over what the technique is, as well as providing a tutorial for how to perform the technique easily.

What is a Reverse Aerial Rush (RAR)?

When playing Smash Ultimate casually, back aerials are a bit of a situational attack to use. It’s limited to only attacking behind your character, and usually will result in a change in momentum to a certain direction. It’d be a tool for getting opponents off of you or maybe landing a killing blow, but not much else.

With the use of this technique, however, you can eliminate the awkward turn around time of trying to back air directly in front of you. Reverse aerial rushes allow you to, without pause, continue your forward momentum and commit to a back air.

This is especially useful for characters with strong back-airs, allowing them to use their characters’ full moveset to zone, combo and kill at optimal percent.

How to perform a RAR (Steps without in-depth explanation)

Dash forwards with your character for a bit before holding the control stick in the exact opposite position. When your character begins to “skid” as they turn around (pictured below), immediately jump and input a backwards aerial.

This technique is tricky and has strict timing, and messing up has serious consequences as you can misinput an attack or your character will do an awkward turn around before attacking in the air. Either scenario can lead to rough punishes from an enemy who has good reaction speed.

With this in mind, remember that the training mode has a speed function! Don’t get upset at yourself for not getting it and remember to take breaks if you feel like practice isn’t paying off. Ramp up the speed until you’re playing at normal, full speed and remember to practice this technique for all of your characters as the majority of the roster have different running speeds! We’ll also provide a video below that has a frame-by-frame breakdown of the technique!

RAR (Technical Breakdown)

When you dash forwards, you must make sure you do so for a short distance before shifting the control stick in the opposite direction. Doing so, the character will enter a unique “skid” animation. This frame is key, as it is when you can input a backwards aerial and keep your forwards momentum going. Not running for the proper distance beforehand results in a different “turning” animation rather than a skid.

If you mess up the frame/timing, you can also wind up doing a forward aerial or dashing in the opposite direction before jumping. Try to have the timing as close to the frame of “skid” animation as possible so your RAR comes out with as little setup as possible.

Tips for performing a RAR

Players have reported success in learning this technique by modifying their controls to be more accommodating for the technique. It is recommended that the right “c” stick be set to tilt attacks, stick/tilt jumps are turned off, and that the “l” left shoulder button be set to jump. By changing your controls to this method, your left hand would be in charge of movement completely, handling both jumping and directional movement while the right hand would only need to worry about attacking.

Another possibility would involve changing how you grab the controller, using a claw-grip like stance to make precise inputs with your right thumb on the c-stick.

Of course, changing your control scheme is a daunting task that requires lots of muscle memory, time, and practice to master. Regardless of its adversity, though, we recommend players at least try and give this method a fair shot to see if it helps them in the long run.

Practical Use for RAR

Though we’ve been mainly discussing RARs with back aerials, it can also be used for neutral aerials that may start their attacks the opposite side of the way they’re facing.

Certain characters benefit from RAR more than others, we’ll break down a few below to help give you an idea.

• MARIO: His forward aerial is a meteor smash that has long start-up and end-lag. Sure, it makes for great spectacle and is satisfying to pull off, but its limited use as a finisher makes it a bit limited. With RAR, Mario (and his echo, Dr. Mario) can instead use his backward aerial to set up combos, zone, or edge guard with. Its fast 6 frame startup and 6 frames of ending lag make it a more preferable attack and it lasts 33 total frames, almost half of his forward air’s 59 frames.
  
• CAPTAIN FALCON: Same story as Mario, his forward air is satisfying, but hard to land correctly, making it little more than a situational move to confirm kills and mess with your opponent. His back air comes out much faster and has much less landing lag (10 frames compared to his forward air’s 18) so even if you miss, you’ll be able to quickly act.
  
• SHULK: Unlike the other two, Shulk actually has a pretty decent forward air. Its large hitbox makes it ideal for zoning, its damage output is decent, and it’s faster than his backward aerial. A RAR is still a decent option with him, however, as his back air simply does more damage and knockback, so while his forward air is a better zoning option, with the use of an RAR to back aerial, he gains more kill potential.
  
• IKE: Same story as Shulk. His forward air isn’t bad by any means, and with its higher knockback, it’s a better killing move than his back air, but its 11 frames of startup is longer than his back air’s 7. Thus, reverse aerial rushing with Ike allows him to have a quick move that can take opponents by surprise.
  
• WOLF: Though his forward air is normally the faster move, with quicker startup and overall less total frames than his back air, if following up his RAR with a back air and then auto cancelling said back air, his back air becomes the far superior option to just using his forward air with the potential to only be as fast as 23 frames long. Combining two advanced techniques can be pretty rough, though, so obviously practice would be needed to combine these two together.

CONCLUSION

We hope that this article has helped you to see the importance of Reverse Aerial Rushes. It’s not an exaggeration to say that knowing this technique will help you utilize your characters movesets to their fullest potential. Combining this technique with other advanced techniques, such as auto cancelling, will also help improve your gameplay. Remember, though, getting these techniques down consistently will take time! Be patient with yourself as you try and learn these advanced techniques!