In the third and final DLC for Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, players enter a world without the titular main character. Future Trunks' timeline is a grim one in which Goku fell ill and died due to a heart disease. As a result, he was unable to protect the world when the menace of the Androids came to ravage it. Fans are certainly excited about the concept, but there is still some confusion about how it is being implemented, namely when it comes to Future Trunks. It's clear that Future Gohan is treated as a different character than the Gohan players have access to in the main game, but Future Trunks is a slightly different story.
This Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot DLC kicks off years after the Androids arrived, and Future Trunks is already a young teenager. As most expected, he doesn't retain the level that players have grinded to for Future Trunks in the main game, but instead has his own level, stats, and moveset.
At the start of the DLC, Trunks is level 20, but this doesn't last for long. The first fight is a training session with Gohan, and depending on how well players perform, they will get enough experience to level up at least to level 21. As players progress through the story and fight enemies, they will continue to level up as normal. There doesn't seem to be any limit to how high level Future Trunks can get, and players crazy enough to spend the time grinding could likely reach level 300 even with Teen Trunks.
After players travel back in time, a cutscene recaps what happened during the events of the Cell Saga. Upon his return, many players expected Future Trunks to simply take on the level, skills, and stats of the main story version of the character, but this is not the case. The player does get a nice chunk of experience at this point in the story, but it doesn't simply place them at the level of their other Future Trunks character. This means players can still go and grind experience for Trunks if they would like to, and that both forms of the character are completely separate from one another.
Like Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot's first and second DLC, There are a few things that will carry over into the main game. Any kind of level grinding or item farming that the player takes part in is only going to be reflected in the DLC areas, but all of the new skills that Future Trunks unlocked in his skill tree will be made available in the main game. This means that the player's high level Future Trunks character will be able to use DLC specific special attacks and transformations.
Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is available now on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.