Part of what makes the Destroyer both fun AND hard is that there’s no “easy way out”. The first form has insanely high, though dimishing, defense, so even those normally 7000 damage Split Bodies will have trouble denting it… they actually put this form FIRST, so that YOU’RE the one who gets beat up by attrition rather than it being possible to “finish off” in this mode. By the time you do get to the low-defense final form, it starts doing LARGE amounts of damage to your whole party… and unless you’ve been totally owning its defensive form, you won’t last long enough on suicide mode to finish it. Which is not to say that you’ll be able to last long by healing either.
…And all that just applies to the WEAK version, where you’ve beat all 4 Megaman-ny precursor bosses. :bowser:
That said, there are still things you can do to be cheap and makes things a LOT easier on yourself. Having two people casting Reviver EVERY turn makes it hard to lose without running out of JP first (which can easily happen fast with Reviver). And packing one of the mage/staff hybrid people like Tiberius or Yan Fan with all 4 of the game’s Life Canes gives you multiple second winds on that viscious final form. My best experience fighting it was when my party was getting owned fast wth the Destroyer just a few hits away from death, and Tiberius as usual went last out of the boss’s 2 actions and my (remaining) 3. When he got his Life Cane break off at the end of the round, he was at 30-odd HP, alone, and about to die from the Abyss Wind super-poison. BOOM! Instant full-party full-heal.
You can even beat the bastard alone, and not just through the “Elephant beats on the enemy in invincible mode, hoping to win before your main runs out of LP” method. But doing so involves HEAVY knowledge of the game’s equipment system, to be able to get past all 4 True Devil Lords AND the big one with just your main. And also a lot of JP and Reviver. So it rewards you for being a knowlegeable player, but it requires more knowledge than just “Final Attack + Life 2, + Knights of the Round, + hours levelling those skills = Instant win”.