Don't make another Heavy Metal FAKK 2. The game was complete crap.

The best third-person action/adventure I've ever played is Beyond Good & Evil. If you haven't played this game, DO IT. Use it as a prime example. It's about what I'd expect Secret of Mana to look like on modern hardware. However, I would recommend some type of co-op mode. Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles is a great modern SoM clone.

Far too many games lack co-op modes. When you have good network code and a shallow story, there's really no excuse for leaving out co-op. Far Cry is an excellent example of this: why not have two players instead of one? There's even a second character in some parts of the game, but you can't play her! The code was there, and it wouldn't have broken the story. These short-sighted design decisions are completely absurd.

Halo (for X-Box) sort of smudged on this: only one Master Sergeant showed up in the cut scenes, but you could still play with two people. It still worked. Halo co-op was a fantastic gaming experience. (It was lost somewhere in the transition to PC. This has me utterly dumbfounded.)

Edit: Someone might bring up the co-op mod for Far Cry. Don't bother. It was ridiculously buggy and actually broke the single player game.

I recently played The Suffering.
It had a standard 3rd person chase cam, and sometimes used a fixed cam for some rooms.
The nice thing about it, however, was the option to switch to First Person perspective. When you did, the game actually BECAME a FPS. some controlls were slightly different to appeal to the FPS style.

For some, jumping from one ledge to another is harder in FPS tahn in 3rd Person, but for other, its the opposite. Having both views was nice to be able to see the environment easier. You cant look up as easy in 3rd person, so alot of games ahve a First Person view taht you can use to do it, but then you're usually at a vast disadvantage if you get attacked in First person Mode.In the Suffering, you could look around the environment, and not have to change views to kill the bad guys.