Still can’t get past madame butterfly.

She's an optional boss so you could always just move on for now and come back when you feel more confident

I second the suggestions for moving on. You'll gain some attack power/beads that will make things easier.

Here's some other suggestions if you don't skip her and for learning combat in general.

1. Watch some videos of combat against her, particularly speed runs or no-death charmless runs with the controller in your hand. Practice hitting the buttons when the Youtuber does to help get the timings down.
2. When you fight, try taking your hand off the left thumb stick, avoid using items besides the gourds, and only focus on regular attack/dodge/jump perilous attacks. What's likely happening is paying attention to too many things at once and not actively focused on learning cues. Give particular attention to the visual and audio cues that let you know when you've perfectly parried an attack and when she's shift from defending to attack you. These moments are signalled by specific noises and lights/sparks.
3. After you've spent some time focused on memorising her basic strings, go all out again but try to keep your movements to an absolute minimum and Sekiro in her face. There are only a few times you Sekiro should be from moving at all beyond walking to stay in her face.
   1. Tap vertical jump to avoid her perilous sweep
   2. Run away from the spectres and get behind pillar when she turns them into butterflies.
   3. (optional) Tap dodge to avoid her jump down grapple. You can also just throw a shurriken at her while she's on the wire.
   4. (optional) dodge once to the side after she perfectly blocks your attacks and counter-attacks (listen for audio cue) to get a hit in.

She's actually an optional boss so you don't have to beat her. Considering you want a save after beating her, you can just ignore her and save her for later if you want. There is nothing after her too so you really don't need to beat her to see anything else. As for how to beat her.... keep up the pressure and deflect as needed.

Move on without beating her. She's a difficult boss if you fight her early. There are less punishing learning opportunities at your current level. Can come back to her later.

First off rebind sprint to right trigger, it's a superior way to play the game. Remember that you can shuriken her out of the air. If she's perched on the wire she'll block it though, you have to wait until she actually leaps off it. It's very important to stay aggressive against her, attack until she deflects and be ready to counter deflect so you can go right back to attacking. You will build a ton of posture this way. Make ample use of sprint to close the distance when she backs off or evade her shurikens/phantom energy. Also make sure to get the midair deflect skill because it allows you to start to safely incorporate jump-ins to your approach, jump attacks come out faster than sprint attacks so they can be good pressure, and also you can block if she starts to attack whereas you can't block out of sprint right away so it's safer when you get close. If you stay hyper aggressive you can actually get through the entire second phase without giving her a chance to summon the ghost bois.

Also you have beaten Oniwa, right? The "intended" progression is supposed to be getting the flame barrel from Hirata, then returning to the present and using it on Chained Ogre, then going to Oniwa. He's much easier than LB, will uograde your attack power, and the NPC you meet after him gives you the extremely good Ashina Arts scroll. Bad idea to take on LB before doing all that, she is supposed to be the second major boss you fight.

Learn how to deflect and dodge for as long as you can, without hitting her. It will "click" when you learn her patterns of attack, and then deflect, dodge, or block everything she throws at you. Then you will begin to see the openings when she's able to be attacked. Be methodical, but not greedy. Attack once or twice, then back off. Throw shurikens at her when she's in the air to bring her to the ground before she attacks.

The way I did it (yesterday) was to hit once or twice and dodge left or right, hit a couple more times and dodge back the other way. When she jumps in the air throw a shuriken at her to knock her out of the sky and repeat as before.

When she summons spirits just run around until they turn to stars (or whatever) and keep running until they all miss you then go back to step one.

I beat her by being relentless even if i took damage, I was on her like a fly on shit. Was it easy, no, but it worked.

I was super stuck aswell and had so many hours of tries with her but then I finally saw i video with Fuzzy Bearbarian on Youtube. And i took her down after less then 20 tries today. So happy! Imo it helped so much and i have been watching his vid now on my next bosses aswell. I am chearing for you! 👍

I’m not seeing the purple smoke... maybe I’m just a fucking idiot... Jesus. I haven’t had this much trouble since demon souls... hahaha.

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