Necrozma in Ultra Sun and Moon

...And we're back! Briefly, anyway! For some reason or other, Gamefreak and Nintendo decided to release direct sequels to Pokemon Sun and Moon only one year later, forcing us all to repeat a bunch of gameplay still fresh in our memories if we want to check out new content that includes a few wonderful new Pokemon...and the answer to the mysteries presented by the weird Necrozma. Already we could tell that it was some sort of dragon-like entity rearranged into a broken, incomplete humanoid form, and our hunches proved basically exactly right. Necrozma is a mere shell of what it is "supposed" to be in its native Ultra Space, and in its effort to reconstitute itself, it is apparently capable of parasitizing its fellow Ultra Beasts, Solgaleo and Lunala.

Designwise, there isn't a whole lot to explore here. "Dusk Mane" Necrozma is literally a slightly modified Solgaleo with pieces of Necrozma grafted to it, interestingly providing it with a pair of giant, clawed arms but kind of detracting from both the jagged scariness of Necrozma and organic slickness of Solgaleo.

It is fairly interesting that this corruption of Solgaleo, the sun deity, is named after Dusk, when the sun is going down. It drives home that the big kitty is being drained of its life by the alien interloper.

Likewise, "Dawn Wings" Necrozma represents the parasitization of Lunala, and Necrozma's presence really only stands to break apart the bat's beautiful aesthetic, but of course that's the point. These two forms are more about their concept than their visual effect, just like countless middle-stage pokemon evolutions.

Interestingly, both of these forms come with an in-battle "ultra burst option" that functions exactly like a mega evolution, transforming them into...

"Ultra" Necrozma, the true form of this entity all along. Perhaps disappointingly, it doesn't quite resemble a rearrangement of Necrozma's body parts, but I guess that's because it's also fused with either Solgaleo or Lunala. Both will result in the same "Ultra" form here, and I think they did a decent enough job of communicating both of them at once.

Ultra Necrozma's design is kind of forgettable for me, looking similar to other pretty-yet-menacing legendary dragons we've seen before, but it does have an extra dash of the alien that I can respect, and the lore surrounding it is interesting enough; a terrifying cosmic entity that feeds on light, sometimes until all light has been stolen away from an entire dimension. Whether or not it actually originated in Ultra Space is never clear, but your passage through Ultra Wormholes now allows you to encounter legendaries from all across the series, so everything I said about legendaries (and possibly all pokemon) technically beginning as Ultra Beasts seems all but confirmed.