There's also Soul Blazer. It has fun "rebuild the world" thing.
Soul Blazer, Illusion of Time/Gaia and Terranigma are a trilogy of games which are known as the Soul Blazer Trilogy.
If you play one of those and like it, I really recommend checking out the others as well.
You should keep in mind that Soul Blazer is the first entry in that trilogy and is therefor missing some of the features and is less refined. So if you want to start somewhere and know you would hate to go to a less refined game, you should start with SB then move to Illusion of Time and finish with Terranigma.
Never heard of [...] Secrets of Evermore.
Secret of Evermore was a very niche game which was produced in the US and never released in Japan. It's gameplay and graphics are in the likeness of Secret of Mana but a lot darker.
The biggest differences between SoM and SoE are the "magic" system and the multiplayer.
The alchemy system in Evermore doesn't use mana, but resources, which can be gathered or bought. But those spells can still be leveled, which is a problem as you have to grind resources to train your spell. In SoM you could just visit and INN and pay with the money you gathered from the slayed monsters.
SoM featured 3 player coop where, when playing alone, up to 2 characters were controlled by the ai. SoE in contrast has only 1 ai companion (which is a shape shifting dog). The player can chose which character to control but there no multipalyer component. Singleplayer only.
PS: There is a bigger difference but I'd also like to recommend the Y's games.
