Originally posted by TenThe cape is not overpowered. People just don't design around it properly. Same goes with the spin jump. Don't want the player to fly? You can alter the mechanics of the cape or do away with the powerup entirely, or you can simply not give the player enough room to take off in a level you don't want to let them skip in such a way.
Of course, if a player resorts to flying over your level rather than playing it as intended, that might mean your level isn't fun.
I'm not so sure about that last comment you made. Many players are going to take the optimal strategy whenever possible, that's just how people are. Nintendo, clever designers that they are, tried to actually account for this in the early donut plains stages.
Nintendo knew people were going to fly over Donut Plains 1 regardless of how fun it was and used that as an opportunity to teach players how flying with the cape works(note the up-down positions of the coins in the sky) and showed off one of the main ways to find secret exits later on in the game, to those who happened to find and abuse the cape. If you don't fly over the level, you will likely miss out on a major teaching moment, because they wanted to show the player what the cape could do for them, and figured that most people would use the optimal strategy, regardless of how fun or unfun the level was otherwise.
The problem with the cape is that introducing it so early called for the entire rest of the game to be redesigned and recontextualized around it, and I get the feeling that the cape was only introduced later in the game's development, AFTER most levels were already designed, because they did a shoddy job of that.
SMW would've probably been a better game if it had, say, the propeller mushroom from NSMBW, or if the P-balloon was introduced early on and used throughout most of the game, and then the cape was finally introduced in the late game, giving it sort of a through-line for Mario's aerial abilities.
I've become very grumpy these last few years, and have been biting my tongue here in SMWC's forums quite a bit. I just want to let you all know that if ever I come off as harsh, I still care about you all. You guys are great.
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http://reyleias.tumblr.com/, butchered by me)