One section of the Disney canon that seemed to be one of the most obvious choices for a series like Kingdom Hearts to acknowledge had to be Tron. So it was little surprise when Kingdom Hearts 2 decided to essentially retell the story of the original Tron, except with the added bonus of throwing Sora, Donald, and Goofy into the mix as the player surrogate.
It's also interesting that this happened before Tron: Legacy had launched, or even likely been greenlit, with the only the original movie to work off of by the time Kingdom Hearts 2 released. Now, with multiple video games, a sequel film, and a short-lived animated series having continued to fill out the Tron universe, it looks like the Heartless enemy Magnum Loader may have informed the continuation of the series more than the first film.
Magnum Loader Color Design
Many of the Heartless in the series are specifically designed around the world they appear in, with a few more generic enemies like Kingdom Hearts' Shadows thrown into the mix to help round out the numbers. In the case of the Magnum Loaders, this meant bringing the digital linework and vibrant colors from the original to life in a series that was already known for some strong use of color schemes. The result wound up creating creatures that would later look like they would have belonged better in Tron: Legacy than in the original movie these enemies were supposed to be emulating.
Dark blacks, lined with neon colors are a bit of a callback to the original Tron, but have a much stronger contrast than was practically available when the movie was first being produced. It's like the Magnum Loaders and other Tron styled enemies in the Space Paranoids level better showed the intent of the dark atmosphere that the first movie was going for. This all makes these Disney-inspired Heartless stand out against the way that the area had been designed, making the Magnum Loaders look both like they belonged in the Tron area, and feel like a foreign entity that needs to be dealt with.
Classic Tron with Early 2000's Graphics
There's a lot to be said about how the design of the Space Paranoids level itself both lent itself to a reimagining on PS2, as well as introducing a unique variant of Heartless that couldn't exist anywhere else. The look of the classic Tron film required a ton of work to get working in 1982, when using computers to enhance the visual effects was seen as cheating. That being said, much of what fans remember of that original movie wasn't actually achieved digitally, and needed to be hand-painted across several different layers of film on a frame-by-frame basis.
The result of this painstaking strategy for editing is that much of the computer world has a blue and grey tint to it, since the stark blacks the movie was originally going for would have blocked some layers. This overall atmosphere still made it into Space Paranoids in Kingdom Hearts 2, but some of the original attempts to take stark contrasts of pitch black and bright, neon lights together were able to make it into whatever new was added. For the most part, this only really means that the Magnum Loaders and other Heartless designs from the level were able to hit the color pallet in a way that Disney wouldn't get a second chance at until Tron: Legacy.
Unfortunately Not Repeated in the Tron: Legacy World
Considering how strong of a showing the contrasting color scheme had when adapting Tron into Kingdom Hearts 2, it's unfortunate that Tron: Legacy wouldn't arrive to the series until Dream Drop Distance. While the 3DS game had some stellar Dream Eater and Nightmare designs, none of the enemies really felt like they were designed with the specific worlds in mind. So, even though Tron: Legacy was designed with the stark blacks and vibrant lights from the ground up, the Magnum Loaders and similar Heartless couldn't make a return appearance.
Instead, players fight what at that point had become fairly generic enemies that were better designed to be the player's friendly companions than the unique enemies that scattered each world. There are a few enemies that come directly from Tron: Legacy to fill out some of that design scope, but these are humanoid programs that can't take on the same animated roll as the Heartless. Still, there's always a chance that more Tron will be reintroduced into the Kingdom Hearts series moving forward, which could mean for a return or reimaging of the Magnum Loader and others like it in the future.
Kingdom Hearts 2 is available now for PC, PS2, PS3, PS4, and Xbox One.