I'm not speedrunning this game or anything, just was playing the English translation for the first time and found something neat.

If you enter the menu, you can just wait out the allotted time. No effort required for the first three phases as long as you exit the menu before the phase is over, because it won't end until you're in normal gameplay again. Obviously no time save here but I thought it was worth mentioning.

Oh that's awesome if that's the case. I'll test this out and see if I can get the timing and stuff like that nailed down, but this is a very useful tip for the second phase in particular.

Thanks for letting us know about this!