It's probably more of a subjective thing. For me, the later games don't quite have the same appeal. The gameplay, story, music etc were brilliant in Secret of Mana. In fact one of the spin offs, either on the Playstation or a handheld was an old Final Fantasy Adventure Gameboy game rejigged as a secret of Mana game. The newer games seem too focused on having nice artwork but the gameplay is a bit lacking.
Couldn't agree more, I got badly burnt spending around £50 to get Legend of Mana imported for the PSX and things haven't gotten any better since. SoM and SD3 (which some call SoM2) were the pinnacle of the series and it seems they haven't been able to get it right since. Both of the SNES games had me hooked the minute I started to play them and I never felt like I was playing them solely to waste time, even when grinding them to hell for magic upgrades I always seemed to have fun. Anything that has come out since has failed to hold my interest for anything more than a few hours and I now consider the series to be one that is well past its best.
Been a bit sociable these last few days so I had to put this on hold. Tonight though, I carried on from where I left off... Trying to get back to the Zeal Empire area. I managed to get back to the castle where I had a battle against that Dalton. I easily defeated him and I had to go to that Underwater palace to stop Queen Zeal from resurrecting Lavos. The palace area before I reached them was quite annoying but I breezed through it. I then got to the save point and readied myself for a boss battle. This time, instead of Dalton I had to fight those Twin Golem bosses. I went in cocky and got my ass kicked a number of times before I decided to level up a bit. The twins were only hard because they would use a move that takes half of your HP off, and they did that twice. Anyway, after levelling up 6 levels for each of the characters and getting Chrono's ultimate move, I took them down with ease. After lengthy scenes on this storyline and that of the Airship part and meeting Magus the last parts of the game were available. I just need to get a Chrono Clone Doll from 1000AD and then take on the end boss part. I will leave that for tomorrow though, and I will also not be attempting the side quests for ultimate weapons and such as I am swamped with games to finish. So far so good it seems.