RE4 Remake Separate Ways Guide: Ada's Arsenal and the Grapple Gun

Open the Merchant's stock page on your first Separate Ways run and something is missing. Scroll the list twice if you like. There is no Broken Butterfly. No Killer7. No Handcannon waiting at the end of a Professional clear. Ada Wong walks through the entire DLC without a single magnum, and that one absence rewires how you spend every peseta you pick up.

That is the thing people get wrong about Separate Ways. It is not Leon's campaign with a red dress pasted over it. Different guns, different economy, a grapple hook that is an actual combat tool instead of a cutscene prop, and two boss creatures that never appear in the main story. Here is what is in it and how to build for it.

What Separate Ways actually is

Separate Ways is paid DLC for the 2023 Resident Evil 4 remake. Capcom announced it during PlayStation's State of Play on September 14, 2023, and shipped it a week later on September 21, priced at $9.99 (£7.99) for owners of the base game. It is also bundled into the Gold Edition, so if you bought RE4 late you may already own it without realizing.

You play Ada across seven chapters, running a parallel mission to Leon's: retrieve the Amber and the research behind it for Albert Wesker. The timeline overlaps with the main campaign constantly. You are the one who rings the church bell that pulls the mob off Leon. You are the one who shoots Méndez in the back through a window while he is strangling him. You are the one who finds the red-warhead rocket launcher in the island Guard Tower and throws it to Leon during the Saddler fight in Chapter 7.

The main game runs sixteen chapters. Seven is a real campaign, not a bonus stage, and it has its own Merchant, its own requests, its own treasure economy, and its own weapon upgrade tree.

How it differs from the 2005 version

If your only reference point is the PS2-era Separate Ways, throw most of it out. The original was five chapters (two village, one castle, two island), unlocked for free by clearing the main game, and it was noticeably thinner. Ada started with a Blacktail, her shotgun, 30 handgun rounds, 15 shells, a First Aid Spray, the default attaché case and five bars of health — and then hit the Merchant only to find that the weapon upgrade option was disabled entirely in that mode. You could buy and sell. You could not tune anything.

The 2005 version also never got a visual pass, because it was built for the technically weaker PS2 port. Its cutscenes are pre-rendered slideshows to this day.

The remake fixes the structural problems rather than just the resolution:

• Full upgrade economy. Every one of Ada's weapons has a five-level upgrade chart and an exclusive upgrade behind a ticket, exactly like Leon's.
• Seven chapters instead of five, with genuinely new geography — Gregorio's Waterway under the castle and the island Comms Facility are both off-limits in the main campaign.
• The I.R.I.S. lens, an Interactive Retinal Inquiry System disguised as contact lenses, which Ada uses to pull up footprints and clues you cannot see with the naked eye. It gates story progress in a couple of places.
• A stalker plot. Ada gets infected early and spends the campaign hallucinating, which is the through-line the 2005 version never had.

Completing the original unlocked the Chicago Typewriter for the main game plus the "Special 2" costume set. The remake's rewards work differently, which we will get to.

The grapple gun is a real weapon now

In 2005 the hookshot was contextual only. Red "GRAPPLE GUN" prompt, Ada swings, cutscene over. It moved her through geometry Leon could not reach and did nothing else.

In the remake it does three jobs. Traversal is still there. But it also fires as a ranged attack that yanks Ada to a staggered enemy for a launched melee follow-up — the equivalent of Leon's roundhouse, except you close forty feet to deliver it. And it strips shields: get close to a shield-carrying Ganado, wait for the Grapple Shield prompt, and Ada rips the plank away and leaves the enemy naked.

That last one matters more than it sounds. Shielded enemies are the reason Leon burns shotgun shells and rifle rounds on chip damage. Ada solves the same problem with a tool that costs zero ammo and has no cooldown. Build the habit early and your resource curve for the whole DLC looks completely different from a Leon run.

Ada's full arsenal

Here is every weapon Ada can actually hold in Separate Ways, with what it costs and what it eats out of your case. Slot counts are the real constraint — this is a mode where a single purchase can swallow a fifth of your inventory.

Prices are the Merchant's base cost in pesetas. Ada begins the run with the Blacktail AC and the TMP; the Sawed-off W-870 shows up in his stock from Chapter 2 onward.

The handguns and the TMP

The Blacktail AC is Ada's custom Blacktail — "AC" reads as Ada Custom — and it is a slightly downgraded version of the gun Leon buys. Lower precision, lower power at level 4 and below, but it climbs to the same maximum power once fully upgraded, and it is the smallest gun in her kit at four slots. It is a completely fine primary for the entire campaign.

The Punisher MC is the inverse case: the Merchant Custom version is better than Leon's Punisher, with higher power from level 2 upward and the same signature exclusive that punches through five stacked targets. If you liked lining up corridor shots on Leon's run, this is the more interesting handgun, at the cost of two extra slots.

The TMP is your other starter and does what the TMP always does — dumps rounds into a crowd, chews ammo, and stays useful because submachine gun ammo is its own crafting line and does not compete with your handgun reserves.

One shotgun, no magnum

The Sawed-off W-870 is the only shotgun in the campaign. Full stop. It trades ammo capacity and tightness of spread for higher raw power versus Leon's standard W-870, and it has one quirk that catches people: Ada fires it from the hip when aiming, so the crosshair does not sit where your muscle memory from Leon's run expects. Adjust up for headshots or you will spend the first chapter clipping shoulders.

And then there is the hole where a magnum should be. Leon's Broken Butterfly tops out at 27.00 power. Killer7 and the Handcannon are both flagged main-game-only. Ada gets none of them.

Her substitute is the Blast Crossbow, a one-shot bow firing explosive bolts. It starts at 13.00 power and reaches 22.00 fully upgraded — real magnum-adjacent numbers, plus splash damage, plus an exclusive upgrade that widens the blast radius by half again. The catch is the case: 15 slots (3x5) against a magnum's tidy six, and a magazine of exactly one. It is not a panic button. It is a setup weapon you fire into a group before they close, and it demands you plan your inventory around it.

The other honest option is skipping the crossbow, running the Sawed-off plus the Stingray, and treating the Blast Crossbow as a boss-only pull from storage.

The two knives

Ada starts with the Tactical Knife, which shares its stat sheet with Leon's Combat Knife: 0.60 power scaling to 1.00, durability climbing to 2.20, and an exclusive upgrade that raises attack speed by half. It parries, it stealth-kills, it breaks.

The Elite Knife costs 50,000 and is unbreakable straight out of the box — no repairs, ever. But look at the numbers before you commit: it scales from 0.55 to only 0.75 power, a quarter weaker at max than the Tactical Knife, and it takes an extra slot. Its exclusive upgrade doubles power, which is the only thing that pushes it past the Tactical Knife on raw damage.

The real question is whether you would rather stop paying the Merchant for repairs or keep the faster, harder-hitting blade. On a first Professional attempt where a broken knife means a failed parry means a death, unbreakable wins. On a normal run, save the 50,000.

What to buy first

Ada's economy is tighter than Leon's because her two best-value guns are also her two biggest. My order:

1. Max ammo capacity on the Blacktail AC first. It is four slots, it is free, and capacity upgrades are the cheapest damage-per-peseta in the mode.
2. Buy the Sawed-off W-870 the moment it appears in Chapter 2. You have no other shotgun and no other reliable answer to a Ganado wall.
3. Then pick one big gun, not two. Blast Crossbow (15 slots) or Stingray (14 slots). Buying both before your case has grown will leave you with nowhere to put herbs.
4. Exclusive upgrade tickets go on the Sawed-off. Power x1.5 on your only shotgun outperforms spending the ticket on a handgun you were not going to lean on anyway.
5. Elite Knife last, if at all. 50,000 is most of a big-gun purchase.

If you want the general framework behind that priority order, the weapon upgrade guide lays out how exclusive tickets and capacity upgrades interact in the main campaign — the same math applies here with a smaller shopping list.

Requests, Spinel and the waterway bass

Separate Ways keeps the Merchant's blue request notes and the Spinel currency behind them, so all the habits from the main game carry over. The clearest example is the Lord of the Waterway — a Separate Ways-exclusive bass hiding in Gregorio's Waterway beneath the castle, the mode's version of the Lunker Bass. It takes eight slots, restores a large chunk of health if you eat it, and sells for 8,000 pesetas. Sell it instead of eating it and you complete the matching request for 8 Spinel.

That is the shape of the whole economy in miniature: a chunky item you can convert into cash, health or Spinel, and you only get one. My default is selling — health is craftable, Spinel is not, and the Merchant and Spinel guide explains why exclusive upgrade tickets are almost always the better sink for blue gems than anything else on his table.

Treasure combination logic is unchanged too, so the gem combination rankings still apply — do not sell a Butterfly Lamp bare.

The two monsters Leon never meets

Pesanta — internally U-III, and called "the Black Robe" before you learn what it is — is the campaign's stalker. Lore-wise it is Ramón Salazar's former housekeeper, experimented on by Isidro Uriarte Talavera (the man who became the Verdugo) until she became a human-insect hybrid and one of Salazar's two bodyguards. It scratches Ada in the castle dungeon during Chapter 1, implants a parasite, and then dogs her across the entire campaign with hallucination attacks while Luis works on a suppressant.

Here is the part worth knowing: U-3 was a Leon boss in the 2005 original. Saddler taunted him about "It" over the radio, and it burst out of a wall in the island's underground cellars in Chapter 5-3 for a fight staged across collapsing crate rigs. The remake cut it from Leon's campaign entirely and rebuilt it as Ada's personal problem instead — final form included, tail Plaga and burrowing centipede stage and all. If you finished the remake's main story wondering where U-3 went, this is the answer.

Martinico is the other one, and it is not a boss fight at all. It is a Dominant species Plaga test subject from the island Comms Facility, regenerative past the point that Regeneradors manage, and the wiki is blunt about it: impervious to conventional weapons. You do not kill it. The entire encounter is a chase-and-hide sequence, and getting grabbed is an instant-death animation, not a chunk of health. It dies to the facility's laser grid — the same corridor Ada threads on her way to the terminal — and not to anything in your case.

Do not waste ammo on it. Players do, every time, because RE4 has trained them that everything has a health bar. This one does not.

For the fights that are fights — El Gigante, Saddler, the multi-stage Pesanta — the positioning and stagger principles from the boss guide transfer directly, with the grapple gun replacing Leon's kick as your stagger payoff.

Professional, A rank and the Chicago Sweeper

Separate Ways has its own difficulty ladder and its own unlock behind it. Clear the DLC on Professional with an A rank or better and the Extra Content Shop opens up the Chicago Sweeper (Vertical Foregrip) for 1,000 CP — Ada's drum-mag submachine gun, 50,000 pesetas at the Merchant, 21 slots (3x7), and an exclusive upgrade that makes its ammunition infinite.

The other big-ticket item is the Infinite Rocket Launcher, and there is a quiet discount most people miss: it costs 1,500,000 pesetas in Separate Ways versus 2,000,000 in the main story. If you are hunting the infinite-weapon unlocks, Ada's campaign is the cheaper grind.

Worth it overall? At ten dollars for seven chapters, a distinct arsenal, two exclusive areas and a boss Capcom cut from the main game, yes — with one caveat. Play it after the main campaign. Half of what makes it land is recognizing a scene you already lived through from the other side of a window. If you have not finished Leon's run yet, the beginner guide is the better starting point, and Ada is also playable in The Mercenaries if you just want to feel out her kit first.

Quick Action Checklist

• Separate Ways is $9.99 paid DLC (released September 21, 2023) or included with the Gold Edition — it is not a free unlock like the 2005 version was.
• Seven chapters in the remake versus five in 2005, and the 2005 Merchant could not upgrade weapons at all. This one has the full tree.
• Use the grapple gun as a weapon: ranged pull into melee, and the Grapple Shield prompt strips shields for free.
• Ada has no magnum. The Blast Crossbow (13.00 to 22.00 power) is the substitute, and it costs 15 inventory slots.
• The Sawed-off W-870 is her only shotgun. Buy it in Chapter 2 and put your first exclusive ticket on it.
• Ada aims the Sawed-off from the hip — aim higher than your Leon muscle memory expects.
• Elite Knife is unbreakable but maxes at 0.75 power against the Tactical Knife's 1.00. Buy it for Professional, skip it otherwise.
• Sell the Lord of the Waterway rather than eating it: 8,000 pesetas plus 8 Spinel from the matching request.
• Do not shoot Martinico. It cannot be killed with weapons; the sequence is a chase, and the laser grid finishes it.
• A rank on Professional unlocks the Chicago Sweeper (Vertical Foregrip) for 1,000 CP, and the Infinite Rocket Launcher is 500,000 pesetas cheaper here than in the main story.