Make no mistake, the first volume of Maiden Rose is a straight out porn. It might have some "story" to pad the scenes between, sure, but it's on the level of "I'm not in the beach this is a bathtub" intro. The sex scenes themselves are unexpectedly high cringe and riddled with stock one-liners. Thankfully, those forced sex scenes (forced both literary and literally) are not present in most of rest of the manga. The first volume alone is enough to make a very bad first impression though.
The story itself feels like just a device to get the two protagonists together most of the time. It's like the story isn't the most important part of this manga, it being a BL is. This isn't being helped by the fact that there is very little worldbuilding, which is problematic for a military story set during the world war of a fictional world. As we don't have much info of the politics, geography, relation between the countries (with the exception of generic "fictional japan isn't fond of fictional west") or history, any military operation depicted in this manga feels like a meaningless filler as the reader is unable the feel what is its importance or what would it change in the grand scheme of world war. See for example Saga of Tanya the Evil for much better portrayal of a world war in fictional word setting. Then again, as I've mentioned previously, good story isn't exactly the primary focus of this manga or the primary content the intended demographic wants.
Sometimes I even got the impression that the author herself doesn't really know where to go with the story. Which is somehow understandable given the irregular publication thanks to which this manga has only 25 chapters available after almost 15 years of being "published". At that point I would have forgotten what I was going to write too.
The art is actually surprisingly fine for a BL. Which means that it doesn't burn your eyes with anatomically inaccurate monstrosities, the author can actually draw backgrounds et cetera. I wouldn't call it a great art, but I can understand why some would do when compared to other works of the genre. My greatest complain would be a character design of one of the protagonists who looks like his face got smashed with a brick.
Overall, this isn't a good manga in general, but it certainly above average BL manga. But that's given by the standard for yaoi being so damn low. The fact that the mean score of this is so high is caused by a specific group of people that gives very high ratings to anything that has hot guys having sex with other hot guys and almost nobody else reads shit like this.
