I don't know about the game wresting control away from me - I always felt that the final decisions were... mine, just that I had tried multiple paths that had ended in dead ends and the option to "fight" was one that I was reluctantly going down because I couldn't think of anything else. I remember that when we talked about it there was some vital difference in how we played that fight the first time that made your experience very different from mine, but I can't remember what it was... nevertheless, all the ways that you volunteered there to set up the battle would have been good alternatives to how he handled it.
There was an interview I read a while ago with the makers of You Don't Know Jack, well before it was a Facebook game, where they said that one of the most important things in making the player believe they were interacting with an "intelligent" host was to respond to inaction as well as action... something which not a lot of games do at all. In The Granstream Saga, it does exactly what Undertale does to you twice in a row at the start of the game - you're told "I'm going down to the basement, don't follow me under any circumstances" and just by a game saying that, you know that you're going to have to do exactly the opposite of what it tells you. So in a game built so much to subvert the expectations of a normal RPG, a reaction to staying in the long corridor and an option to stay with Toriel forever would have been... nice.
Now, this is the most difficult thing that I'm going to try to convince you of, but... I don't believe that Radiation intended any personal malice towards the player in performing that switch, nor tried to suddenly take away a game that they could emotionally invest in - while I do see exactly why it happened, the break in emotional investment during the Toriel fight is your own reaction. I reacted differently to it, specifically because I had reluctantly gone down a path that I hadn't intended to complete, giving me (and Xaq, too, by the sound of it) a massive feeling of guilt - exactly the ride of emotion that the author had intended the player to experience.
But I do understand the want to stay away from being made to feel like that - even though for me, being able to experience it in a group like this is a way to... heighten that experience and share it together.
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There was an interview I read a while ago with the makers of You Don't Know Jack, well before it was a Facebook game, where they said that one of the most important things in making the player believe they were interacting with an "intelligent" host was to respond to inaction as well as action... something which not a lot of games do at all. In The Granstream Saga, it does exactly what Undertale does to you twice in a row at the start of the game - you're told "I'm going down to the basement, don't follow me under any circumstances" and just by a game saying that, you know that you're going to have to do exactly the opposite of what it tells you. So in a game built so much to subvert the expectations of a normal RPG, a reaction to staying in the long corridor and an option to stay with Toriel forever would have been... nice.
Now, this is the most difficult thing that I'm going to try to convince you of, but... I don't believe that Radiation intended any personal malice towards the player in performing that switch, nor tried to suddenly take away a game that they could emotionally invest in - while I do see exactly why it happened, the break in emotional investment during the Toriel fight is your own reaction. I reacted differently to it, specifically because I had reluctantly gone down a path that I hadn't intended to complete, giving me (and Xaq, too, by the sound of it) a massive feeling of guilt - exactly the ride of emotion that the author had intended the player to experience.
But I do understand the want to stay away from being made to feel like that - even though for me, being able to experience it in a group like this is a way to... heighten that experience and share it together.