Uploaded October 2020 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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Full no-death run of BreakThru (ブレイクスルー) for the NES by Data East. This was played on a real NES with the real cart.

Stage Listing:
00:00 - Start
00:39 - Stage 1 - Mountain
01:48 - Stage 2 - Bridges
03:57 - Stage 3 - Prairie
05:27 - Stage 4 - City
07:08 - Stage 5 - Recover The Aircraft
09:17 - Ending

BreakThru is a conversion of an arcade game from the 80's, one of many such titles that made it's way to the NES. It takes a lot of hints from the oldest days of the arcades, where stages were short, and the goal was mostly to post a high score. In fact, a single loop of BreakThru only clocks in around 10 minutes or so to clear the 5 stages.

You play as a jeep that must navigate through various terrain dodging obstacles, making jumps, and killing everything in sight. Yes, this is another platformer/shmup hybrid, where you not only need to dodge bullets and enemies, but also need to make jumps and avoid ramming into walls or falling into the water.

While the game does play as a traditional auto-scroller, you can also increase or decrease your speed which consequently increases or decreases the scrolling rate of the level. That actually makes this one of the very few shmups that can not only be played for score, but also for speed running.

Increasing or decreasing your in specific areas is mandatory in order to either make jumps or avoid the many enemies that populate the 5 stages. This actually has quite a bit of a learning curve to this game and it basically involves managing your speed properly.

When I first started playing BreakThru it seemed nearly impossible to avoid the enemies as I found myself going way too fast most of the time. You must juggle the tradeoff between having enough speed to dodge obstacles and make jumps, and less speed to more accurately dodge the enemies fire.

There is only a single powerup that increases your shot into a 3 way spread that can easily mow down everything in sight. Unfortunately this powerup comes with a timer attached to it so it doesn't last forever, with the sole exception being in stage 3 where one of the powerups will last the entire stage. If you die, the powerup goes away.

Picking up the items can be tricky as they drop from the sky and you must time your jump properly to get it. I also found that a few of the item drops were straight up traps and would nearly always get you killed if you went for them. You can also rack up a bunch of extra lives via scoring 20K per life, and you can also get items which give you extra lives as well.

BreakThru loops forever, with only a short interlude/cutscene being played after you beat stage 5.