Here's a mini guide on ff fair.
How Does This Work?
Hit with forward air and fast fall it so you land after any of the hits but the last. Even though you get a bit of landing lag from this, it still gives enough hitstun to follow up with something like a grab, ftilt, or even an usmash. You don't necessarily have to fast fall the fair, but it gets you to the ground quicker possibly giving you higher frame advantage.
Two Different Hitboxes
The weak hits of fair has two different hitboxes. The bottom half of Pikachu pops the opponent up and the top half does a weak spike forcing the opponent to land. They both technically have the same amount of hitstun, but the forced landing from the spike hitbox adds an extra frame of stun. With the pop up hit, hitstun normally runs out in the air so the opponent's options are going to be his aerial ones, but characters that fall fast, like Fox, will sometimes recover from hitstun on the ground giving you the extra frame of hitstun. Another thing about the pop up hit is when used on floaty characters it will sometimes pop them up too high, limiting your follow ups. So you generally want to go for the spike hitbox as it gives the extra stun and allows you to have all your follow ups. The pop up hitbox can be good too to get them in the air and go for some mix ups.
Frame Advantage
This is the amount of frames you have over your opponent before they can recover from hitstun. For example, having a 6 frame advantage on your opponent gets you a guaranteed grab, assuming they're in range. Frame advantage is affected by the amount of hitstun you do and the height you're at before your last hit of fair. Hitstun is only affected by the opponent's weight and the amount of rage Pikachu has. Your opponent's percent and move staleness does not affect it at all. To get the most optimal frame advantage, you want to be at 150% and have your last fair hit spike them while Pikachu is one frame above the ground.
I only tested 4 characters for frame advantage, but this chart should give you a general idea how everything affects it.
See new chart
here.
Character | Min Frame Advantage (Pop up hit) | Max Frame Advantage (Pop up hit) | Min Frame Advantage (Spike hit) | Max Frame Advantage (Spike hit) | Max Frame Advantage (Spike hit) (Max Rage)
| 2 (in air) | 5 (in air) | 3 (on ground) | 6 (on ground) | 9 (on ground)
| 3 (in air) | 6 (in air) | 4 (on ground) | 7 (on ground) | 10 (on ground)
| 5 (in air) | 8 (in air) | 6 (on ground) | 9 (on ground) | 12 (on ground)
| 6 (on ground) | 9 (on ground) | 6 (on ground) | 9 (on ground) | 12 (on ground)
The min advantage is from ending your last fair hit 4 frames above the ground and max advantage is from ending it 1 frame above the ground. I'm not entirely sure on the last column of numbers due to rage only working outside of training and I can only count frames in training mode. But it seems like max rage gives you at least an extra 3 frames of hitstun. It could possibly be more than that on some characters.
Follow Ups
I'm not going to say much about this, but just use whatever you think is best for the situation.
| Speed
Jab | 2
Ftilt | 6
Dash Attack | 6
Grab | 6
Nair | 7
Dtilt | 7
Utilt | 7 - 13
Dsmash | 8
Usmash | 10
Grabs will probably be your most common follow up as it's very good for racking up damage. Dash attack and usmash are great for getting kills. Slower moves like Fsmash (15) can be used too if they're in the air and you're expecting them to air dodge even though they should be jumping away.
