The game itself does a horrible job of explaining the controls (it does everything pretty badly now that I think of it) but there is one button in particular you need to know about and it's not the dodge button, it's the "I win" button.

Contols Punch Kick Heavy Punch Dodge Run Focus (a.k.a. the I win button)

The main strategy I used is throwing light punches at enemies until the red light light on the side of the screen turns blue indicating you can use the "I win" button which is bound to L1 by default. The "I win" button turns every attack into a finishing move allow you to knock out enemies much much faster than by normal attacks and give you a much bigger sweet spot for dodge-countering during boss fights which require at least one dodge-counter attack to break their defense before you can cheese them with "I win" button finishing moves. The game controls are terrible and the characters teleport constantly so it's nearly impossible to be good at this game which is why I used brute force over any real strategy. Get focus, hit the finishing move- that's about it.

The majority of the game time is spent in un-skippable cut-scenes; if anyone figures out how to break these scenes and skip them I would consider them my personal hero; this is a terrible game and any effort to make it shorter is truly god's work.

P.S. -there is a grab button, I forgot it existed as it's practically useless. Never use the grab button.