Lady Butterfly Sekiro Guide

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Jesse Alexander

Jesse James Alexander (JJA) Has been a gamer since he was old enough to use his hands. His earliest memories revolve around playing Doom, Duke Nukem, and Tomb Raider on the family computer with his father every weekend. To this day he can almost always be found with a controller in hand or reading about something videogame-related. He loves survival horror, RPG's, FPS's, and is a fan of black coffee. He spends his nongaming time with his cat and dog, making music, or djing various events in his home of Las Vegas.

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Intro

FromSoftware’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is not an easy game. Throughout your journey as Wolf, you will face humans, demons, and monsters who want you dead and will stop at nothing to see that goal through. Each encounter requires strategy, precision, and the patience to try again as you learn your foe’s movements and determine the best course of action for defeating them.

One of the most challenging and heartbreaking battles is when Wolf faces his childhood mentor Lady Butterfly and finds out she has betrayed him. But like all enemies in Sekiro, she can be beaten.

Quick Facts

• Location: Hirata Estate
• Signature Attacks: Illusions, Kunai Throw, Rafter Jump, Whirlwind Kick, Waltz, Perilous Sweep
• Rewards: 1500 Experience, Sakura Droplet, Memory: Lady Butterfly
• Birthplace: Unspecified location within Ashina
• Voice Actress: Cindy Robinson (English) and Tomoko Miyadera (Japanese)

Lady Butterfly Lore

Lady Butterfly has a mysterious past, with little known about her. While she’s up in age, that hasn’t stopped her from being elegant and lethal. Ever since childhood, she trained in the illusionary arts in the Usui forest outside the land of Ashina. Due to her unique expertise with illusions, she has maintained a reputation as a fearsome warrior.

At some point in her life, she met up with Wolf’s father figure, Owl, and agreed to mentor Wolf when he was a little boy. Her fighting technique combines elements of several different styles that other enemies will demonstrate throughout the course of the game, as seen when she uses her leg to deflect strikes and attacks with powerful high kicks.

Her skills with magic aren’t limited to just illusions, as she also can subdue people into trances and place them into a stupor.

How to Find Lady Butterfly

Bell Charms are unique artifacts that carry memories within them that the player can then offer to the Buddha statue located in the Dilapidated Temple. Players must first discover the Young Lord’s Bell Charm to fight Lady Butterfly. Fortunately, that can be found very early in the game. While exploring the Ashina Outskirts, look inside a war-torn house and seek out an older woman, the Timid Maid.

Upon speaking with her, she’ll mistake you for her son and give you the Young Lord’s Bell Charm. You’ll want to offer the bell charm to the Buddha statue sooner rather than later, as certain events happen at the end of the game that will result in the Timid Maid disappearing and locking you out of exploring the Hirata Estate and challenging Lady Butterfly.

Once you offer the Young Lord’s Bell Charm, you’re instantly thrust into the Timid Maid’s memory of an assault on Hirata Estate. While the Estate used to be a place of peace, it’s been ripped asunder by bloodthirsty bandits. Thankfully the path is pretty linear. You’ll make your way across a bridge and through a small settlement before eventually approaching the flame-ridden estate. Once here, you’ll have to dispatch a bevy of enemies, including the mini-boss Juzou the Drunkard.

Slaying the Drunkard

Equipment to Consider Bringing

• Antidote (Mitigate his poison damage and stay in the fight)
• Shinobi Firecracker ( Stun the drunkard and chip away at his vitality)
• Flame Vent (Use in conjunction with Oil to punish him)
• Fistful of Ash (An alternative to the Firecracker)
• Gachiins Sugar (To stealthily eliminate his bandits and challenge him more intimately)
• Gokan’s Sugar (To protect your posture from his heavy combos)
• Ceramic Shards (To distract his bandits and create more space, allowing you to eliminate them one by one without Juzou knowing)

In true FromSoftware fashion, you must defeat a mini-boss before defeating the main boss. Also, in true FromSoftware fashion, Juzou is equipped with various deadly attacks and has a posse of bandits at his disposal. Thankfully, you have a few options for taking him out. I recommend chewing on a Gachiins Sugar and coming equipped with Ceramic Shards to distract his bandit squad.

Using stealth to your advantage, you can make your way around the arena and clear out his friends, making facing him less daunting. Also, there is a friendly NPC, Nogami Gensei, who you can talk to, and he’ll help you out. He’s not strong enough to defeat Juzou on his own, but there is strength in numbers nonetheless.

Once you clear out his bandits and speak to Gensei, be prepared for a challenge. Juzou has a lot of power and can make short work of you if you don’t come prepared.

Juzou hit’s hard and hits fast, with many of his attacks having a wide range of damage. You’re going to want to be precise when facing him. Juzou often uses his Vertical Slam, Double Horizontal Slash, and Diagonal Slash combos and can quickly break through Wolf’s posture. When faced with these attacks, the best tactic is to sidestep to the left and use that brief moment to get a hit in.

When he does the second part of a combo attack, you’ll want to deflect the second attack and use that moment to get in a couple of additional hits on him. Be patient, read his body language, and strike only when necessary. If you keep your rhythm right, you’ll eventually whittle down his first health bar and land your first death strike. Like many foes in Sekiro, he requires two death strikes to be subdued.

If you need a breather, don’t hesitate to run away from him and make space. Juzou is most likely to drink from his sake bottle whenever there’s a gap between you two. As he takes his sips, it gives you breathing room to consume a Healing Gourd or munch on a Gokan’s or Ungo’s Sugar to help bolster your defense and posture damage. Another tactic is making him drink from his Sake and then pelting him with a bottle of oil, and then using your Flame Vent to light him ablaze.

After you cut down his first health bar is when the fun part begins. Juzou starts relying on his Sake to poison his blade, and you will want to be careful. Thankfully, he’s not that graceful. Every time he does his Sake Spit, you’ll want to strafe away from it and use his blindspot to sneak in a few attacks to continue chipping away his health and posture. When he uses his Poisonous Sword, you will want to evade his attacks as even if you guard, you will still build up poison.

Thankfully, Antidote Powder is cheap and plentiful, and his wide swings are easy to evade. It only took me a few tries to bring him down, and with enough patience, you can easily best him. Once Juzou is eliminated, enter the Estate and seek out the Timid Maid cowering in a corner. Once you find her, all you’ll need to do is descend a staircase to the Hidden Temple, where Lady Butterfly awaits you.

Upon defeating Juzou, you’ll be rewarded with the following items:

• 212 Experience
• Unrefined Sake (First Playthrough)
• Heavy Coin Purse (New Game Plus)

How to Defeat Lady Butterfly

Equipment to Consider Bringing

• Loaded Shuriken (Strike her when she’s airborne to give her a taste of her own medicine)
• Flame Vent (Eats away at her vitality and can stun her long enough for you to heal)
• Shinobi Firecracker (Stuns her and allows you to land a few quick hits)
• Snap Seed (Make short work of her pesky illusions)
• Pellet (Restore your vitality but helps keep you in the action so you can break her posture)
• Ungo’s Sugar (Raise your defense in case she gets the jump on you and lands one of her punishing combos)
• Fistful of Ash (An alternative to the Flame Vent and Shinobi Firecracker)

Phase One

Right off the bat, you’ll want to keep your guard up. Lady Butterfly is one of the faster enemies in the game. Thankfully, she’s semi-predictable in her movements, and if you study her body language enough, you’ll quickly come out on top. She’ll frequently jump into the air to strike you down with kunai, but two can play that game. Every time she ascends, you’ll want to use a kunai of your own to knock her down and hit her posture meter.

Lady Butterfly possesses two Perilous Sweep attacks in her first phase, and you’ll want to jump backward or sidestep to avoid both of them. Every time you see the red kanji flash above her head, move out of the way, but not too far, as you’ll then want to rush her and get back in her face.

She has high defense, but her posture isn’t as durable as her health bar. The simplest and most effective way to defeat her first phase is to stay on the offense and get in her comfort zone. If you keep a steady balance of offensive strikes and defensive parries, you’ll quickly make mincemeat of her posture meter and be able to land your first death blow.

I encourage players to take a more offensive route because her move set becomes limited if there isn’t much distance between you two. If you give her a wide berth, she’ll pull out nasty tricks such as her Wire Hop and Prowl attacks. These techniques revolve around her maximizing the hidden temple’s verticality and jumping from support beam to support beam, using the height and distance to inflict severe damage with far-range and up-close attacks.

She becomes limited by staying in her face and is forced to rely on close-quarters techniques that can be more easily dodged and parried. Once you break her posture and strike your blade into her heart, she’ll quickly enter phase two.

Phase Two

Upon defeating her first phase, Lady Butterfly reveals that you are fighting nothing more than an illusion, and she enters the fray. Don’t be intimidated; aside from a few new tricks, she’ll mostly stick to the same tactics. The main differences between phase one and phase two are her use of illusions and the evolution of her kunai into homing particles. When she summons her illusions, you have a few options at your disposal to clear the field of them.

If you’ve used many of your shurikens and need spirit emblems, feel free to strike them down. Otherwise, a Snap Seed will clear them out, or if you run around the arena long enough, they’ll eventually disappear. After the illusions are dissolved, she’ll transform them into homing particles, and the easiest thing to do is stay on your feet and hide behind the assorted pillars in the arena.

Otherwise, the strategy and techniques for this phase are essentially the same. Lady Butterfly relies on distance between her enemies to be at her most lethal, so when you deny her that luxury, she’s forced to use different strategies. You’ll want to continue staying close to her and balancing the rhythm of deflection, dodging, attacking, and repeating.

Beat her at her own game by using the arena’s layout to your advantage every time she summons illusions or uses her homing particles. Her speed and techniques make it easy to feel overwhelmed, but there’s no reason to be.

Upon defeating Lady Butterfly, you will be rewarded with the following items:

• 1500 Experience
• Sakura Droplet
• Memory: Lady Butterfly

FAQ

Conclusion

Like any FromSoftware experience, the challenges we face as players are worth their weight in gold. While Sekiro may stray from the traditional Soulslike experience by focusing less on role-playing and more on high-speed combat, only a fool would think it’s any easier than a Dark Souls entry or Elden Ring. Lady Butterfly makes her entrance relatively early in the game, but she’s an important test of skill.

If you’re able to best her, you’re much more well-equipped to handle the level of challenge needed to see the game through. It’s an emotional and rigorous battle, but the satisfaction of knowing that you were able to take down your childhood mentor is incredibly rewarding.

Lady Butterfly may have speed, agility, and magic at her disposal, but you, my friend, have the proficiency required to take her down and succeed on your journey. As in real life, within the world of Sekiro, the student does surpass the teacher.

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