The Tournament of Power acted as the climactic finale to Dragon Ball Super. In the end, Goku, Frieza, and 17 were just barely able to defeat Jiren through their combined efforts. However, the recently released Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero allows players to explore a number of “What If” scenarios where the story effectively deviates from the canon material.
For example, we’ve seen a scenario play out in which Gohan continues his training and even faces off against an original antagonist. Another deviation from the story can see what happens if Jiren prevails over Universe 7 in the Tournament of Power.
In this latest situation, it’s possible for Universe 7 to recruit Trunks for the Tournament of Power instead of Frieza. Needless to say, this ends up creating less tension within the team considering just how antagonistic Frieza is with everyone else.
Trunks ends up being a good pick since his unique “Super Saiyan Rage” form gives him a power level that’s fairly comparable to Goku and Vegeta’s Super Saiyan Blue transformations. Even with this transformation, Trunks ends up enduring a number of tough battles throughout the event.
Initially, Trunks opts to join the tournament in hopes of using the Super Dragon Balls to undo the damage of his timeline. Of course, it should be mentioned that if Trunks fails to perform well enough in a practice battle, he’ll basically just depart back to his timeline rather than continuing on with the Tournament of Power.
Eventually, however, he’s presented with a branching path of either interacting more with Vegeta or 17. This will ultimately affect which character Trunks ends up bonding with during the series of battles.
Either way, the character development that Trunks undergoes during this story has him conclude that it’d be better to bring back the universes lost during the Tournament of Power, just like with what happens in the canonical story.
In one branching pathway, Jiren is actually defeated off screen, funnily enough. Trunks doesn’t even end up interacting with Jiren, while he and Vegeta are able to overcome Toppo after effectively ascending to a God of Destruction’s level.
With the other choice, Trunks basically takes Frieza’s place in the final battle. This results in a slightly different outcome in terms of which contestants are left standing after the final push.
Ultimately though, the whole story does seem to undermine Frieza’s participation as it basically suggests that Frieza wasn’t as essential of a team member as the canonical story made him out to be. Me personally, I think I would’ve liked to see more “What If” scenarios that had bad endings due to how things diverge from the canonical timeline.
Check it all out below: