Naruto: Kakashi's Raikiri, Explained

gamerant.com:

Famed as the Copy Ninja, Kakashi Hatake is one of the strongest characters in the world of Naruto. Having been introduced as the leader of Team 7, Kakashi went to establish himself as one of the strongest and, at the same time, most influential characters in the entire series.

Being a mentor to the likes of Naruto and Sasuke, he had to live up to high expectations and he did so without fail. Throughout his time as the leader of Team 7 and even as a Kage, Kakashi, time and again, proved his strength. In fact, his genius as a combatant is such that, over the course of years, he came up with countless of his own techniques, and one of the strongest of them ended up becoming his signature technique, called Raikiri.

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To understand Kakashi's Raikiri, fans need to take a deeper look at his past as a ninja and how he grew stronger over the years. As a child, Kakashi was deemed to be a prodigy. In fact, he is the youngest Chunin and Jonin to exist in the world of Naruto to date, and it was quite apparent that he'd be an excellent ninja in time and perhaps even a Kage one day. At some point, Kakashi was assigned to Minato Namikaze's team and in doing so, he got to learn the trade of ninja from the very best.

Minato, being quite skilled himself, was attempting to perfect the Rasengan by adding nature transformation to it, however, couldn't succeed at this attempt. Kakashi, who was a Jonin by this point already, also learned the Rasengan and could use this technique perfectly. In fact, he even attempted to add his nature transformation to the jutsu. Just like Minato, however, Kakashi ended up failing as well. His failure at creating the Lightning Release: Rasengan or a variant