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Mod author: Kaeloree

Version used for review: 1.3.1

“This mod adds a series of dialogues to the lovely elven wild mage Neera, in BG:EE, as well as a flirt menu for those who engage in a romance with her. It also adds two tweaks to make Neera and Rasaad same-sex romanceable.“

Neera is certainly a divisive character. Plenty of people enjoy having her in the party both because of her exuberant nature and in spite of it, while others would rather have her removed from the game entirely. I fall rather definitively into category of enjoying her as a character, and I find that she ends up in most of my parties.

It feels like the Neera Expansion mod, released not long after the Enhanced Edition itself, is built in particular for people like me. If you don’t like Neera, then you flat-out won’t like this mod — it is quite literally just more Neera.

The fact that I can say that is praise enough in of itself. The writing here is strong enough that it feels like some of it could be cut content, in particular one conversation in which Neera shows remorse over the actions that led her to leave the High Forest. Her original dialogue implied that she grievously injured some of her peers by accidents, but she didn’t really seem that torn up about it beyond that one dialogue. I imagine that this is somewhat due to the quality over quantity approach that Beamdog took to their new companions in BG:EE — there simply wasn’t enough real estate to include it.

This mod expands on what came before in organic ways, and in these conversations it makes Neera feel like a more realistic character. Many of the talks involve discussing the player character’s past, making observations on current events in the story, and generally giving the eventual romance a little more time to grow. All of these are pretty standard for mod-introduced dialogue — Candlekeep, Gorion, and the events of the story are the most ‘obvious’ conversation topics one could write about, but here they’re given a twist appropriate to Neera’s character. She’s never boring to talk to, and that holds true here.

The new dialogues are woven in between Neera’s standard ones, which can make it very obvious which conversations are modded and which aren’t — this is at no fault of the mod’s, but due to the fact that so much of Neera’s dialogue in BG:EE is voiced, it kind of stands out when it isn’t. As much as I’d like this to be a totally seamless intergration, it’s sadly an impossible request.

This is further cemented by the fact that some of the dialogue triggers can be a little wonky — for example, Neera’s first new modded dialogue occurs after the first standard one, and at the end of it she’ll ask if you can stay at an inn tonight. Staying at an inn should trigger the next modded dialogue, but instead it triggered the next standard one. The next time I force-talked her, the post-inn dialogue triggered. This may have been my fault, since I was intermittently using the console to speed up time, but if that’s the case then let this be a warning — this mod doesn’t interact well with speeding up time.

There is also an option to make Neera (and Rasaad) same-sex romanceable, and given that this was a new feature, I had to try it out. The new dialogue was surprisingly fickle with how it treated a same-sex romance with Neera. Some lines clearly indicated that Neera was speaking to a woman, but other times the dialogue reverted to a rather heteronormative status, as seen when Neera briefly mentions the idea of having a husband, and the player can respond something along the lines of “Anyone you had in mind?” even if they are playing as a woman. A simple change to something like “what about a wife?” would have gone a long way, but given that the romance in BG:EE is treated as a bit more of a budding thing than a full-blown relationship, it’s not too much of an issue.

Something else that this mod adds is a flirt menu once the player enters this budding romance. I found some of them to be quite cute, but I’m ultimately not that big of a fan of player-initiated dialogue — I find that it diverts from the original design a little too much for my tastes, but the fact that they’re here is good for those who enjoy them. I have most definitely seem them done worse than they were here. It would have just been nice if they were included optionally.

That is, honestly, all the critique that I can give to the Neera Expansion. It’s just more Neera, and I think that’s a good thing. It doesn’t fundamentally change anything about her character or her backstory, though as I understand it, it was released before Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition came out, so it didn’t get to benefit from Neera’s characterisation in that game. Despite this, I found that it managed to strike a nice balance between Neera’s naiveté in BG:EE and her more proactive self in BG2:EE.

If you like Neera, you can’t really go wrong with trying this one out.

Thanks for reading.