Nintendo won't port Super Mario Galaxy 2 to the Nintendo 3DS because Mario looks like a "speck" on the handheld screen.

The Japanese game maker explored the possibility as it was creating Super Mario 3D Land, which launched last month to critical and commercial acclaim - but quickly found the 2010 Wii platformer was inappropriate for the 3DS.

"When we started developing [Super Mario 3D Land], we displayed Super Mario Galaxy 2 on a small TV monitor and found that Mario looked like a speck and that the game was difficult to play," Super Mario 3D Land director Koichi Hayashida told IGN.

"This led us to look into the camera and terrain types that would be conducive to playing on a portable screen with a relatively large Mario. If we were making a console game, from the very start, we wouldn't have been thinking about any of those things, and I think the game would have probably been a lot different."