I was eleven when Final Fantasy VII came out. PlayStation. Three discs. The kind of game where you clear your weekend, turn the lights down, and don't tell your parents how late you stayed up. I remember the opening cinematic, the train, the reactor. I remember understanding immediately — without a tutorial, without a tooltip — exactly where I was and what I was supposed to feel about it.
That's the part that stuck with me. Twenty-nine years later, building search architecture for enterprise sites, I keep coming back to Midgar as the cleanest example I know of a complex information environment that gets the hierarchy exactly right.
The Toonami generation and information environments
If you grew up on Toonami — Dragon Ball Z, Cowboy Bebop, Gundam Wing, Rurouni Kenshin — you know what it's like to be dropped into a complex narrative world with no hand-holding. You figured out the power levels, the political factions, the character relationships, through immersion. Not through a wiki. Not through a FAQ. Through paying attention to the environment.
That generation has a different relationship with information environments than people who grew up expecting everything to be explained to them. We learned to read signals. We learned to navigate complexity without being guided through every step. And when something is poorly designed — when the signals are missing or contradictory — we feel it immediately.
Most enterprise content sites are poorly designed in exactly this way. The signals are missing. The hierarchy is flat. There's no Midgar.
What Midgar gets right
Midgar communicates its entire social and political structure through visual design and spatial positioning before a single line of dialogue. The upper plate is literally elevated above the slums. The reactors are physically dominant. AVALANCHE's base is cramped and underground. You don't need anyone to explain that the people on top have power and the people below don't — the architecture tells you.
This is information hierarchy done physically. The user never has to ask "where am I in the structure?" because the structure is expressed spatially, not described textually.
Now compare this to a typical B2B SaaS website. The navigation has six items of equal visual weight. The homepage has three different hero messages competing for attention. The hierarchy is not expressed — it is buried in tooltip text and onboarding flows that assume the user doesn't know how to read an environment.
The best information environments don't explain themselves. They express themselves. The user feels the hierarchy before they read a word. Most websites do the opposite — they explain everything and express nothing.
The search connection
In search architecture, this maps directly to how AI engines evaluate your content. When Perplexity or ChatGPT reads a page, it is scanning for structural signals — question-led headings, direct-answer paragraphs, clearly delineated sections — the same way a Toonami kid reads an environment. It is looking for the hierarchy expressed in the structure, not described in the prose.
A page with a narrative H2 like "Our approach to customer success" gives an AI retriever nothing to orient by. A page with "How does [product] handle customer onboarding?" gives it an immediate, matchable signal. The content underneath can be identical. The hierarchy expression is what changes.
The Midgar equivalent: Cloud doesn't arrive in the slums and read a sign that says "You are in the poor section of the city." He arrives and the environment tells him. Your best pages should do the same — the AI retriever should know what section it's in, what question is being answered, and who wrote it, without reading a paragraph of body copy.
Earned complexity
The other thing FFVII gets right — and most content sites get catastrophically wrong — is the sequencing of complexity. The game has an enormous number of systems: materia, limit breaks, chocobo breeding, weapon upgrades, the entire Weapons storyline. None of it is front-loaded. You get a sword and a mission. The complexity is introduced at the rate you've demonstrated you can absorb it.
Most content sites front-load everything. Feature lists on the homepage. Pricing tiers before you've established why you're different. Integration ecosystems before you've explained the core problem you solve. The user bounces not because the content is wrong but because the sequence is. They haven't earned the complexity yet.
The search implication: a page that tries to answer everything for every user answers nothing well enough to be cited. The pages that get cited by AI engines are the ones that answer one question completely, for one user intent, at one stage of the journey. The Midgar session. Not the whole game.
Why we didn't outgrow it
I still think about FFVII. I think about Cowboy Bebop's episode structure. I think about how Berserk reveals the backstory of the Eclipse. These weren't just entertainment — they were training in how to navigate complex worlds with incomplete information and figure out what matters.
The Toonami generation didn't outgrow this. We grew into it. The skills we developed — reading environments, following distributed narrative threads, tolerating complexity in exchange for depth — are exactly the skills that make someone good at search architecture, content strategy, and AI-era optimization.
I write about the O3BN community at over30blackandnerdy.com — a space for Black nerds 35+ who know exactly what I'm talking about.
And if you want to see how this philosophy applies to making your brand the one AI cites, that's what Sable Search is for.