But it's also grindy, and in the original you don't get the 3rd class change til you're done with the Benevodons whereas now you can make the change right when they become available. The original still has a distinctive feel to the combat that is wholly original and kind of enjoyable, the wait between attacks wasn't as long as it was in Secret of Mana, and it is potentially much tougher than SoM unless you're rolling with a "buff Kevin" comp. In the original, a boss fight that is 30 seconds with a buffed up Kevin could be like 5 minutes if you're spamming spells with Angela. The remake added dodging, enemy skills have telegraphed AoEs, you can use Tier 2 and higher techs (and spells) without them being auto-countered by 1hKO enemy full-screen techs in the latter parts of the game, and casting spells no longer pauses everything. It's interesting, early game, raw boosts can be better (when you are low level +5 strength is nothing to scoff at), but it's worth spending a little to respec IMO once you hit your 3rd tier classes so you can re-prioritize for the strong equippable passives that become available then. So you can still hurt stuff while investing in other stats, and there is reason to invest in other stats, because of the various types of perks you get.
But it doesn't matter as much because now your physical damage is weapon damage PLUS your strength. Depending on the character maybe you get +5 to Strength at 2 points in, maybe at 6. In the remake stats are rebalanced - investing into "Str" points for example doesn't directly increase the Strength stat, but give rewards at point tiers. A Kevin playthrough would take literally half as long as one with Angela.
Oh, and the damage multiplier for Kevin's wolf form was stronger than intended too. Like if you didn't keep strength maxed, you would wind up doing literally 1 damage per hit - conversely, if you did keep it topped off, and then used stat ups and stat downs you would deal absolutely ludicrous amounts of damage. This led to some interesting damage scaling issues. And I think physical damage was just weapon damage minus armor. Armor was in a similar state in that it was CON times X plus Y. In the original, weapon damage was basically calculated as Strength times X plus Y (X and Y values improving as you got better weapons). You probably won't care about this, but the original had a number of bugs, like how Luck didn't affect crit, and damage scaling worked quite differently. Despite having the same story they play very differently.