Very good start. The art style you are going for is very nice. One thing that might be a challenge though, is that if you are comitted to use only black and white (and gray for that matter), I believe you will have visual clarity problems, so you will need to plan very well how are you going to display everything. I think the enemies can end up easely "blending in" into the background. Kinda of an issue already with the slimes. On battle two I didn't even realized there was one with the skelletons.
About the UI, I like it! I didn't see anywhere you displaying the enemy health. I don't know if that is intended, but I think you might want to at least, when I'm selecting the targets, show the same stat box as for the party, but to the enemy. They do that in FF Tactics:
Of course it's early yet, but I would like to seesomething "tangible" about what reducing enemy DR -1 does. Like maybe a negative % in damage increase? Show me the numbers! Would be nice also, if you figure out a way for us to check what the current status are doing to the characters/enemies. Like burn, blind, etc... I see the icons, but I don't know exactly what are they representing ingame.
Good job, keep it up!!