It does work on English, and I was able to do it on console. The timing window to enter the staircase is a little small, but with proper setups, you can make it very consistent. First, try to space the 2 freeze casts apart a tiny bit (not much, just a couple frame cycles) to give yourself a bigger window to get in the staircase. You can also use a 2nd character to get in quicker, but be careful about that because like Yagamoth said, you can enter the staircase too early and it triggers the battle normally. I think this has to do with the event trying to occur (again) during the fadeout, and then it executes at the next possible moment. This would be the same glitch that allows for the pure lands skip, assuming that theory is correct.
Here's a quick SNES9x 1.51rr movie:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/greennpj9mb3mlw/minotaur_skip.smv