I kind of had a feeling Ruby Weapon would be a bit of an anticlimax after that Emerald fight. I mean, Ruby doesn't even have a timer to fight against, so what's there to worry about? Well, the strategy for Ruby was easier to figure out, but the fight itself wasn't exactly easy as quite a bit of luck is needed in the beginning.
I start with only Red alive as this will force Ruby into stage 2 (tentacles buried) immediately. If Red's HP had been 7777 at the beginning, the Lucky Seven frenzy would have done no damage as Ruby is immune to damage until he buries his tentacles for the first time. Instead I enter with 7277 HP and throw a Hi-Potion as soon as he enters stage 2. This is where I need a lot of luck. Ruby will always use one of his tentacles to counter the first attack that actually hits Ruby himself. I need this counter to be from the MP-draining tentacle, which is a 50% chance, but I also need the statuses (Slow-numb and Poison) to miss, otherwise the first Poison tick would do 7777 damage and kill Red. There's a 17% chance the statuses will miss. Luckily, he only counters the first hit, giving me a total chance of 8.5% to get through the Lucky Seven phase of the fight successfully.
During the frenzy, one of the tentacles will almost certainly die, forcing Ruby back to stage 1, but since there's still only one character alive, we know that his next move will be to bury his tentacles again. I take this opportunity to get one Stardust in for a quick 31,108 damage. (The Dazers here was probably not necessary, since Ruby won't counter attacks in stage 1 if there's only one character alive.)
After this, we'll stay in stage 2 for the rest of the fight, so I can safely revive Yuffie at this point. I still need a bit more luck, as I need to survive until I have Reflect (from Mirror), Haste (from Lunatic High) and Resist (from Vaccines) up. I need to do the Vaccines last, otherwise Reflect and Haste won't stick. Reflect is needed to survive Shadow Flare. Lunatic High is the reason Red was chosen as the character to start the fight alive. (In fact, it's why I chose to use him for the Emerald fight as well, but I didn't end up using it there, as Emerald would just remove everyone's Haste with Aire Tam Storm anyway.) BTW, I should have had three Vaccines in my inventory, but I believe one was stolen by a Magic Pot at one point. It's lucky that I didn't need Cloud to be alive as well.
After the Vaccines have been used, there should be no way to lose unless I mess up. After every Dazers, Yuffie has time to use Coin twice before Ruby starts moving again. Red throws a Megalixir between the Coin tosses if necessary. So the big Gil farm before Emerald wasn't a complete waste of time after all. I still had more Gil than I needed, but that was actually pretty nice as I didn't have to be precise with the amount of Gil tossed; as long as I got it below 200,000 before confirming, I knew I most likely wouldn't run out.
The next phase starts around 15 minutes into the fight. On Ruby's 33rd turn in stage 2, and every turn thereafter, Ruby will use Whirlsand if at least two characters are alive. Whirlsand removes a character from the battle entirely, meaning they can't be revived. So throwing all those Dazers on him didn't only prevent him from countering every attack, it also prolonged the part of the fight where I could use two characters. I could have just kept Red alive until Whirlsand, but if he'd used it on Yuffie, it would have been Game Over. I didn't want to gamble on a 50% chance at this point, so I counted Ruby's attacks and made sure Red died before attack 33.
From this point on, the fight becomes very slow. When Yuffie has to throw the Dazers herself I don't have time to both heal and attack before the Paralyzed status wears off, so I just have to heal Yuffie after every hit and wait for Ruby to use one of his two harmless attacks (the MP tentacle or Shadow Flare) before I throw Dazers followed by Coin. At the end, Ruby actually ran out of MP, which honestly caught me by surprise at first. I didn't think that would happen, but it provided some extra opportunities to do damage at the end.
A Spider Web (to inflict Slow on Ruby and make the Paralyzed status last longer) would have been nice, but I had no way to get one on disc three. If I had planned to fight Ruby Weapon from the beginning of the run, I wouldn't have done the guard skip near the beginning of the game, as the Grashstrike enemy (on the way to Reactor 5) was my only chance to get a Spider Web in this challenge.
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