Bah! Who needs to fly, anyway?!
This is probably the most tedious thing I've ever done... roughly 5-6 hours worth of figuring out how to scale the waterfall to the Northern section of Noctilum. Most of that time was spent falling down and trying to get back up again. Skells reeeeally aren't built for precision platforming! I feel like getting to Stonelattice Cavern is underwhelming in comparison to this feat. At least it's proven possible now...
Now the first challenge was finding a way to get high enough to jump to the "hand" (The weird red thing dangling off the waterfall). This was the shortest step. There's only one section of ground on equal level with the hand, so I used that. Luckily there's a bunch of rocky geometry on one side, through a little canyon. Not sure if there's a more efficient way up, but this seemed the most consistent for me.
Jumping to the hand requires an extended jump. What you can do is drive towards the edge in vehicle mode and then transform to walker mode when you're about to go off. The Skell will walk through the air briefly, giving you a little bit of extra distance without losing any height. It's enough to reach the closest fingertip. There are other applications for this sort of jump (certain data probes), and that'll probably be covered in another Xenoblade video I do.
For some reason, they decided to giving all the barbs on the hand their own collision, so you can use them as steps, albeit very narrow ones. Climbing the hand is difficult, if only down to Skell physics. If you're moving at all when you land from a jump, the Skell sort of staggers forward to a stop. If you need to turn around after jumping, you're forced to u-turn in the air. It's all very frustrating. Towards the end, after the fourth hour, I was getting impatient so I resorted to a save/load system, rather than running back to the canyon. It's a viable decision, to be fair, but my Wii U sounded like it was about to churn itself to pieces with every reload...
Most of the video after the climb is just exploring the Divine Roost on foot, since it was all new to me. The other challenge was finding how to get to the eastern-most Data Probe 213, since it's beyond the cliffs surrounding the area, but I've got that covered too.
